G.I. Joe A Real American Hero: Jinx #1 // Review
There’s a ninja who is working for the US military. She’s deep in enemy territory and she’s only got a very short period of time in which to escape with her life. She should be able to do so, though right? It’s not like she’s not familiar with getting in and out of tight situations. She IS a ninja after all. Still...she hasn’t even got a minute in which to escape. She hasn’t even got a full 30 seconds. It’s going to be a tight situation in G.I. Joe A Real American Hero: Jinx #1. Writer/artist Dani works her way through a very tightly-scripted action sequence that serves as one of the more impressively experimental comic book entries into the G.I. Joe franchise.
It’s billed as the most dangerous mission of her life. Jinx is okay with that. And if she isn’t okay with that, she isn’t exactly complaining about it. Not that complaining about it would really do her any good anyway. She’s going to have a hell of a time making it through everyting, though. She’s only got a very small window of time to get out of a snowy mountain before the whole thing blows-up.
Twenty seconds. She’s got 20 seconds to escape before the whole thing goes boom. And there are exactly 20 pages in the issue. So each page is exactly one second and it takes about one second for the reader to work their way through each page. It’s a strikingly clever way to put together a silent issue. No dialogue. No sound effects. One second per page. The countdown continues every single page. As a concept it’s quite clever. As a script...Dani does a very clever job of executing it. It’s all so precise. It’s really difficult to find any kind of fault with it at all.
As an artist, Dani is able to move things along with a strong sense of action kinetics that move briskly across the page. She might not have gotten a total 20 seconds perfectly. Timed-out on the page completely throughout the issue, but she didn’t really need to. The 20 seconds that play out on the page DO more or less happen in realtime, which is pretty remarkable from beginning to end. It’s actually a very, very cool concept. It isn’t very often that something like this is actually attempted. It’s 20 seconds between two covers of an action issue. No dialogue. No complexity...just a quick jump through 20 pages in 20 seconds.
So...the issue retails for $3.99 It works out to being roughly 19.95 cents per second. It’s actually worth it. Dani has done a remarkable job of making it all come together with such vivid visuals. Between this issue and the issue that came out last week, Skybound/Image’s monthlong “Silent Missions” series is half finished. Dani has done such an engagingly good job with this issue that it would be very difficult to top.
