Writer: Rick Remender / Artist: Sean Murphy/ Image Comics
Rick Remender is easily one of the most outside-the-box storytellers in comics right now. Whether it’s the far-future fairy tale, Low, or his twisted, universe traversing, acid addicted version of Lost In Space, better known as Black Science, Remender is running circles around much of his competition in creator-owned comics. Now, his latest cyber-thriller, Tokyo Ghost has hit the ground running, mostly as a cautionary tale of where society’s addiction to technology can lead.
This week sees the story take sort of an unexpected turn. Conned into yet another “one last mission”, Debbie and Led find themselves in a tech-free zone that resembles feudal Japan. Led is forced to “unplug,” resulting in some interesting leaps forward for his relationship with Debbie. Without really giving anything away, if you’ve seen The Last Samurai, you’ve pretty much read a good chunk of this issue. At one point, there’s a line where Remender is blatantly on the nose with his theme of the healthiness in unplugging to reflect from time to time. The character development here more than makes up for the lack of action in this installment.
As far as the art goes, I’ve never seen Sean Murphy’s work at this level. He’s clearly getting more comfortable with each issue because he’s getting progressively better (a pretty high compliment considering he was already delivering grade A work). His vision of Japan is simply dazzling. There’s a great splash in this issue of the forest in the evening that I just wasn’t ready for.
Bottom Line: This book started out “pretty good” but it took Issues #2 and #3 for it to really find it’s legs and start telling a story that, at this point, I could only guess at it’s ultimate direction.
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