Disney Villains: Maleficent #5
The snow has fallen. It's been tranquil. She's expecting company. And it's only a matter of time before they arrive. She will be there to greet them when they arrive. So naturally, it doesn't look good for them in Disney Villains: Maleficent #5. Writer/artist Soo Lee tells a simple tale of a greeting from a villain and her minions. And seeing as the guests are decidedly heroic, it doesn't look suitable for the heroes in question. The action quickly glides across a wintry landscape in another breathtakingly clean and strikingly dramatic issue for one of Disney's most prominent villains.
A team of five knights has been sent out into the snow to ride into battle and defeat Maleficent. She knows that it's been entirely too quiet as a season. She learns to expect them. They know that she's going to be expecting them as well. However, they might expect to get a little closer than they do. The lead night notices Diablo overhead and knows it is a witch servant. It's not there to attack. It is there as her eyes. Goblin-like creatures soon blink their way out of the darkness. The battle begins.
Lee is working with the fundamentals of action storytelling. And she's doing an excellent job with it. There's no need to weigh down the page with a whole lot of subplots or a whole lot of extra little bits of information. What she's getting across is a straightforward and iconic view of villainy. She's doing it in a way that feels deliberately uncluttered. Everything is in the panel precisely the way it needs to be. And she knows this as a writer. She also knows this as an artist.
Lee's art could have a more stark simplicity than the original 1959 film. The lead villain's appearance has a depth that doesn't fit with the cel animation of the original movie. The character design of that original film is so iconic that it doesn't need to be captured perfectly on the page to feel as powerful as it does. Lee's delivery of action is striking and minimalist in a profound way that feels like its own kind of dream on the page. Lee could have punched up the drama occasionally, but the storytelling would have felt WAY too heavy-handed. Some of the more brilliant ends of Lee's delivery lie in her under-selling the drama to amplify it. This approach works beautifully throughout another satisfying issue of the mini-series.
Maleficent's appeal continues on the page as it did in live-action in recent memory and cell animation in the late 1950s. Lee's approach to storytelling maintains the ineffable visual of the story in a way that makes for one of the more memorable entries into Dynamite Comics' Disney Villains series.
