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Assassin is the second major project
from Archangel Studios, the people who brought you The Red
Star. Like Red Star, it's an oddity, set in a
warped version of Earth with a very obvious basis in the real
world. But while Red Star caught most people
unawares, Assassin has the weight of expectation behind
it.
Samuel is an assassin working for the
ever-corrupt capitalist US government. He's assigned to
kill the unwanted human rights activitist Cassandra, a
character who would appear to be intended primarily as an
analogue for Naomi Klein. But alas for Samuel, so
immediately adorable is Cassandra that he is left convinced
that he must change.
This is a less than subtle comic. The
US president is called James Hedge and he likes 13-year-old
Thai girls. The economy is propped up by Asian sweatshop
workers, a concept hyped up to utterly ludicrous proportions.
Take this painfully tortured excerpt from Cassandra's speech:-
"The workers of the world live, work and
breed in sickening captivity, in factory cities that house
millions of slaves. When the sun sets, these workers
retreat into level upon level of coffin sized rooms, in
buildings hundreds of stories tall. Into these coffins
the workers enter for the night. And when they are all
finally "home", the buildings descend into the earth.
Escape becomes impossible."
Yes, yes, we get it. The working
class are kept in slavery by capitalism and tower blocks are
their graves. We're told that the media won't cover
this, which seems frankly implausible even in the most extreme
of capitalist societies; and because Cassandra is drawing
attention to it, she's classified as a terrorist. And if
the message isn't publicised, why are we also told that
Cassandra is a major threat, and how did she attract such a
large crowd to her speech? This is the problem with the
premise - the metaphorical abuse of the working classes is
exaggerated to such a ludicrous degree that it loses sight of
the real world altogether. It might work if it were
played for satirical laughs, but instead the book approaches
it with po-faced seriousness.
Visually, this is a very odd comic indeed.
Where Red Star was an impressively seamless mix of
pencilling and CGI, Assassin is anything but.
It's produced in black and white, and the style lurches
alarmingly from page to page. Some sequences feature
smoothly rendered model buildings and computer-treated
artwork. Other pages seem to have been shot directly
from pencils, and some are sketchy to the point of having
perspective lines still visible on the page. The style
often switches mid scene.
This book is late - it's dated July - and I
can't help wondering whether an unfinished product has been
shoved out for commercial reasons. I see with interest
that Archangel Studios' website lists this as an "upcoming
project" and mentions a colourist - the book is in black and
white. I smell problems. If this is actually
an intentional style choice, it's utterly baffling.
I really don't see this matching up to the
success of Red Star.
Rating: C-
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