Sunday, October 20, 2013

365 Comics...291: Nowhere Men #6 (2013)

Only a few weeks ago I was wondering what had happened to Nowhere Men,  one of the brightest of Image's many bright new series released this year.  It's been quite some time since the last issue.  Two weekends ago I was sorting the massive pile of comics beside my bed, just under months worth, and I noticed there was no issue of Nowhere Men to put away.  Issue 5 didn't seem like the end in any form, and I knew the series was doing fairly well, critically at least, so it shouldn't just have disappeared.   But creator-owned series can be like that... a good book just derails and never gets back on track (I'm still waiting for Spurrier and Irving's gutsville to resume.)  By all accounts though, the way the series was going it didn't appear to be moving in an arc method, but old school serialized,  so maybe there wasn't to be a logical stopping point and a break just needed to be had.

Thankfully, here's issue six where, to my surprise, stories collide, the world comes together, and the first arc presents itself only by concluding.  It's been so long though that a lot of the details aren't fresh to the point wher I was wondering if I had missed reading issue 5.  But it all came together, in a bit more bombastic a fashion than I was expecting for a book about scientists as rock stars, but still good reading.

Stephenson' additional materials, like the opening magazine article and excerpts from a photgraphy collection contribute so nicely to building this pop-sci world and the fab four super-geniuses who redefined life and culture in the 1960s and beyond.  Bellegarde as illustrator brings so much to the table, his hyper-clean style hews closely to a Jamie McKelvie feel but his faces and people have a Tony Harris sensibility, like illustrated exaggerations of real people.  Bellegarde's ability to age his characters, to distinguish them over not just two time periods, but entire lifetimes is astounding.

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