The Good Asian #6 Review

Writer: Pornsak Pichetshote / Artist: Alexandre Tefenkgi / Image We are back in the thick of it and so is Edison Hark. There was a bit of a reprieve (and I do mean “a bit”, considering the tragedy inherent in Hark’s backstory) in the last issue, but we are back in 1936 where Edison is standing over the body of his adoptive brother Frankie Carroway, and there’s a racist detective on the scene. I certainly love reading Pichetshote’s words and looking at Tefenkgi’s panels, but it is incredible how much stressed out I managed to get. The Good Asian #6 opens with a film noir fight scene at its finest. Gunfire is exchanged, guns are discarded in favor of the sweet science of fisticuffs, and the protagonist barely manages to win the fight but not without a few wounds, both physical and mental. The rest of issue deals with Hark on the lam. Given the terrible optics of the situation, he stumbles back in the orbit of his former lover Victoria Carroway, and their reunion is fraught with lots of painful memories and lots of questions of mixed-race relationships in the late 1930’s. It is riveting. Pichetshote expertly goes from period appropriate dialog before shifting gears into more exposition and then into the internal monlogue of Hark. And all of this is happening as Tefenkgi and Loughridge are adeptly crafting brilliant layouts that employ a wide variety of visual cues that make each page an individual joy to parse.

The fight scenes are frenetic and brutal. The romance scenes hav…