At last, a fairly quiet week for the X-books.  Why they can't spread the damn things more evenly through the month, I'll never know.

Anyway, we start off with issue #2 of the Domino miniseries.  Unfortunately, it serves mainly to confirm my fears from the first issue.

But let's begin with the positive, which is the art.  I've always liked Stelfreeze's slightly stylised approach, with iconic figures and backgrounds where the light and shadow are distorted and exaggerated to the point of abstraction.  He's also colouring this series, with each scene saturated in strange, unnatural secondary colours.  For all its flaws, this book certainly looks great.  If you just want to admire Stelfreeze's work from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, and I can well understand why you might, then you'll be very happy.

However, the story doesn't match up to the standard set by the art.  The plot becomes marginally clearer this issue: Domino, who knows nothing about her background, is trying to track down her missing mother.  She's doing favours for the mysterious Jonathan in order to get information, and in the course of all this she stumbles upon news of a weapon that can destroy the world.

It doesn't really work.  The emotional core of this story is apparently meant to be Domino's search for her mother (and, by extension her own identity).  But the plot has nothing to do with that; it's a baffling mess of convoluted mechanics where Domino hasn't got much of a clue what's going on, and sketchy exposition means the readers are likely to be even more confused about the whole thing.    The story keeps hurling secrets and schemes at the reader until it all blurs into grey.  Meanwhile, having no real connection with all the racing around and fighting, Domino's feelings for her mother get shunted right to the outskirts of the plot, where they flounder around in awkward exposition.  ("After all these years... after all my efforts.. I've found you at last... mother.")

It's not awful, but it's a wilfully obscure piece of writing which is too busy being conspiratorial to really get to grips with anything.  That said, however, it does look fabulous.

Rating: B-

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