Malcolm was just out for a night on the town when he got attacked by a group of thugs. He normally wouldn’t have had any difficulty defeating them, but there are extenuating circumstances that find him brought before the boss of the thugs in Savage Dragon #272. Veteran writer/artist Erik Larsen continues one of the longest-running sagas in comic book history with an action-oriented issue that occasionally has the heart to take a look at some of the drama that drives the action. It’s a classic sort of a story that continues to find appeal decades after its debut.

The boss of the thugs turns out to be a big, ridiculously well-built guy with bluish-white skin and red eyes. His name? Well..it’s probably not important, but his name IS Manley Warbride. Warbride is the type of scum that Malcolm Dragon might have been brought to San Francisco to deal with. He has evidently decided to go on the offensive against Dragon right away...having him dragged into his presence so that he can beat the hell out of old fin-head. He’s a ridiculously tough-looking guy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy to take out a guy like Dragon.. 

Larsen is clearly just having fun here. There’s a real sense of action seems to be moving the action from one scene to the next. The writer is also Ing the action against the personal lives of the title character and everybody else in his immediate orbit. It's generally a pretty nice situation. It's generally the sort of thing that's going to continue to move the title forward. It's not terribly engaging, though. Things do seem kind of disjointed as there doesn't seem to be adequate establishment of mood and setting before scenes are set up on the page. The transition between moments feels awkward. It's harder to get a sense of overall continuity in and within the single issue. This shouldn't be for someone who is as experienced with putting this sort of thing together as it Larsen is.

The visual style of comic book legend Jack Kirby continues to live-on in the work of Erik Larsen. The blockiness of the art and the overly exaggerated sense of dramatic perspective feel so distinctive of Kirby. What makes Larsen’s work so interesting is that it takes an art style that really went out of fashion like...sixty years ago and keeps it fresh, new and interesting. As odd as it seems, the overly dramatic poses and the big, blockiness of everything doesn’t seem at all dated under the pen of Larsen. It’s a fun, breezy way to shoot the action across the page. 

It's hard enough to maintain a sense of continuity for our character. Who's been around this long. Even if it's just one person who is doing most of the action as a writer and artist a lot of inconsistency can fall into place here and there over the decades. And it's clear that Larson is having fun with what he's putting on the page and some of that fun is transferring to the reader, it would be nice to have it be a little bit more coherent with respect to continuity between scenes, issues and major eras in the history of Dragon.

Grade: B