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 Good Asian #6

The fight scenes are frenetic and brutal. The romance scenes have a particular air of bittersweet kindness. And the flashbacks that continue to punctuate the main narrative continue to provide salient ethos that accentuates the gravity of everything at hand. Every issue of The Good Asian continues to be elegantly crafted and compelling.

The Good Asian #6 is an excellent start to the back half of the series. All of the cogs are in motion and everything is moving impeccable. This is some of the finest storytelling you can find on the shelves, and the more embroiled in conflict that Edison Hark manages to find himself in, the more invested I become in this phenomenal story.

9.3 “Phone Calls” out of 10

Enjoying The Good Asian? Check out BNP’s other reviews here.

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  • Mikkel Snyder is a technical writer by day and pop culture curator and critic all other times.

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