Black Cloud #2 Review

Writer: Ivan Brandon, Jason Latour / Artist: Greg Hinkle / Image Comics It’s a trippy world on Image’s Black Cloud, a series that follows a young woman named Zelda who lives in our world, but is originally from another one literally made of stories and imagination. Zelda is something of a vagabond, a survivor type who doesn’t fit well in either world, a screw-up of sorts as we learn in this issue as a private talk with another woman from her world hints of bad decisions of Zelda’s past leaving her with a reputation of a pariah. Here, Zelda is in the middle of another potentially bad decision as she makes a deal to essentially kidnap the mayor’s son at the mayor’s request to hide the son from being an embarrassment during election season. The plot itself is simple so far and leaves cognitive space for readers to wrap themselves in this confusing dual world; still, the world being built is complicated, which makes for a hard read up to now – a point of intrigue for the patient reader, and annoyance for the eager. We don’t know exactly how Zelda teeters between worlds, or even what the alternate world is made of and the rules that govern it, so discovering its structure along with Zelda’s past make up half the plot despite whatever crisis she finds herself in currently. Again, two issues in and one thing is for sure, Black Cloud will be for the patient reader.

What keeps you reading for now is not a strong conflict (still developing) or magnetic protagonist (we barely know her)…