Written by Andi WatsonIllustrated by Andi Watson
Oni Press
[Yet another find for the cost of an economy frosty!]
More Romantic Comics fun from Andi Watson, in the concluding chapter of Love Fights.
While Jack, our penciller with a perpetually breaking heart, tries to use finding out info on his cash cow, The Flamer, as a pretense to stay close to his love object, said love object hooks up with a superhero turned private eye in order to get at the truth. While all this is going on, the Flamer is a one-man army against crime, seeking clues of his own.
Things progress haltingly as the private eye tries to get the advantage on the girl, Jack finds out that his cat may not be a superhero after all, and that what the heroes don't know about their past can in fact hurt them. As we find that all the trouble is because of the aftershocks of a familiar kind of crisis, the mother of the Flamer's love child is revealed in a climatic scene that...well, to be honest is not as good as I'd been hoping for.
The best part of Love Fights was that the superheroes and villains were secondary. In this second half, and especially in the ending, there's a definite shift towards the heroes and I don't think that's Watson's strength. The whole crisis thing is too familiar, though I wonder if DC didn't lift some of Watson's ideas for their recent company-wide crossover(!), and the fight scene at the end just doesn't have a lot going for it. The heroes rush in to save the day, and no one we cared about is dead. Once we're at the end, with Jack rebuilding his life, I felt like this should have ended differently.
Still, that doesn't mean this wasn't a good series, and I still enjoyed it. I just think it would have been better with a few less heroics at the end, or perhaps a shifting of those heroics to Jack or another human character (the bad inker spills his wares all over the villain's control panel, for instance!) to keep with the flow of the rest of the book.
