Robyn Hood: The Crawling Chaos // Review
Robyn got called in very early in the morning. Her associate Smitty wouldn’t be calling her in if it weren’t serious. Turns out that there was another mass suicide the previous night. A large group of people burned themselves alive in Central Park. It’s the beginning of a whole new adventure in Robyn Hood: The Crawling Chaos. Writer Joe Brusha delivers another Robyn Hood one-shot to the page with some degree of accuracy. He’s aided by artist Alessio Mariani and colorist Juan Manuel Rodriguez. The standard supernatural adventure story set in New York feels good, even if it isn’t always feeling all that original.
It’s big. It’s got teeth and mandibles and tentacles and claws. It kind of looks like something that might have been designed by H.R. Giger. Ghosthawk calls it a “dimensional shambler.” The good news is that he knows what it is. The bad news is that he doesn’t think it can be killed. It’s not like she or her ally really have any business being there to begin with. They ARE trespassing on private property. They’ve broken into the mansion of a collector of rare artifacts that are rumored to have magical properties. Judging from the look of their enemy, he found something.
Brusha does something kind of interesting with the overall story: he plays against tropes. The idea of the central hero of a story actually being more like a sidekick is kind of fun, but it’s been done before and better. And there have been far too many instances of a female lead being upstaged by her male guest star in the history of superhero comics, so this particular use of that idea feels a bit weak. The central problem is actually pretty cool, though: people are committing mass suicide. It’s easy enough for a superhero to save people who are being preyed upon by a villain...but how does one save a large mass of people from...themselves? Brusha doesn’t find a particularly novel approach to the resolution, but it’s still a fun one to explore.
Mariani places Robyn right in the center of the panel, where she belongs. The fact Robyn’s not really central to the resolution of the conflict does strange things to the artist’s focus on her. The world Robyn walks through is a strange one. The reader is seeing it through her eyes as Mariani is focused on her. Mariani and the colorist Rodriguez do a really good job of firmly establishing the Manhattan setting of the action with some vivid shots of Central Park for the opening action and Columbus Circle for the climactic battle.
It’s another fun adventure for Robyn. Even though she didn’t actually do a whole lot for the resolution of this issue, she still managed to make a very powerful impact on the page. It’s just too bad that she doesn’t have any kind of an ongoing series. She’s definitely interesting enough to hang a permanent title on. The occasional one-shot special is proof enough of that.
