Scumbag #6 // Review
As difficult as it is to motivate someone who doesn't want to be motivated, it's even more difficult to motivate them when they have essentially everything they want. Ernie is everybody's problem and a few people’s solution as he saunters his seedy way through the sixth issue of The Scumbag. Writer Rick Remender continues to develop his title character in a story rendered for the page by artist Bengal. In creating a decidedly lazy and gluttonous main character, Remender has his work cut out for him, giving that character and no motivation to push him into action. Remender manages this quite deftly while continuing to develop and mature a very reluctant and totally immature protagonist.
Ernie is a scumbag super spy. And he wants everyone to know about it. And now everyone knows about it. This would be perfectly fine and not a problem were it not for the fact that these by agency and question still needs him. So they can't exactly get rid of him. But he's not exactly open to the idea of doing more work. So things are going to get complicated. Especially considering he's actually decided to work for them. There's this girl involved. He's decided to like her. This can not end well.
A good portion of Remender’s job is staying a few moves ahead of his main character . Remender is doing an excellent job of rendering a main character so totally infantile and idiotic that he always seems to hold the upper hand. Remender is also doing an outstanding job of making the main characters perpetually inebriated gluttony entertaining. It wasn't too long ago that the main character was at a fabulously decadent orgy. Somehow he manages the top even that issue before things get going. Ernie is determined to find himself lost in total intoxication.
Bengal handles the story with quick clean lines and a sharp sense of the action and absurdity that Remender is playing with. The artist balances the title character's grotesqueness against his reluctant heroism with a suitably over-the-top pomposity without compromising the sleek feel of a futuristic super-spy sort of story. The busts of action look suitably explosive in Bengal's hands, but the artist also has a beautiful grasp of scope and setting with some absolutely gorgeous establishing location shots.
As the series progresses, Remender has to maintain a balance between character development and the intrinsic appeal of his LACK of development. He simply not going to want to do anything that an accident would do. And that's his appeal. And yet, at the same time, if he develops too quickly, he loses his initial appeal. If he's too successful at becoming a good person, he's going to lose audiences. Remender's pacing continues to tread a meticulous balance between progress and arrested development and another satisfying issue. It will be interesting to see where the story goes in the next several issues.
