(A slight detour from The Avengers. I'm away camping over the weekend, so here's some preprepared posts.)
The early 80s really were a golden age for science fiction anthology titles. And so many major artists appeared in them. Today's feature story is an excellent short illustrated by George Perez and written by Joel Cavalieri. It skirts the edge of the science fiction genre cemented by the accompanying stories, though it's a lovely articulation of a Shadowrun adventure, predating that game by a few years, I think.
I've noted before that you're often getting a mixed bag with these anthology titles. Today's is a bit different. Though some of the stories seem to be continuations of serials (should probably have read the series in, y'know, order), I couldn't quite make up my mind whether they were, or were simply written to sound like they were. Reading them from the latter point of view was immensely satisfying. And that's perhaps a nice way to approach any random anthology title. Unless you know for sure, you never know if the story you've read was meant to be part of a larger story or just seemed like it. There's an excellent article on caricature by David Carrier in A Comics Studies Reader that posits that a single-panel comic is actually a part of a virtual series of panels, and our understanding of the single panel depends on our ability to see what has, or might have, come before, and what comes after. Such comics are possibly only because we have the gift of hypothetical thought. So could we consider a comic presented as a part of a series in the same way? And fill in hypothetically what might have happened before, and what comes next?
Though I may read a prior or subsequent issue and blow that theory out of the water. At least for this series.
To be continued.
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