Old Dog #5 // Review
Jack Lynch is sitting down for a conversation with a man in a suit. Jack knows that he messed up. (He lost an arm.) The gentleman in the suit is naturally a bit upset about the whole situation. Just a few moments into the conversation, Lynch’s eye is bleeding. The suit needs to pay attention to this. He’s not. Things get a little out of control in Old Dog #5. Writer/artist Declan Shalvey enters an explosive chapter into the life of Jack Lynch in another well-rendered, well-modulated issue that manages to cleverly mix family drama with spy and monster action.
Retriever doesn’t know everything she needs to know about the situation. They’ve just told her that there are labs in the facility. (She didn’t even know that they HAD labs. Evidently, they’re below the armory.) Whatever it is that’s attacking is ripping through anything and anyone they throw at it. It’s okay: Retriever hasn’t encountered it yet. She might be just the one to deal with the threat. They’ve been attacking it with everything that they’ve got. They’re going to need a different approach. Retriever is just the one to try something new.
Shalvey runs a dual-track plot that alternates over the course of a very tightly-plotted issue. On the one hand, there’s Jack. He’s being confronted with information that he’s not too happy with. On the other track, there’s Retriever. She’s looking to stop the catastrophe of a creature that hits like a force of nature. There’s disaster horror going on in the form of a monster story, but there’s drama at the heart of it. Horror has tried this sort of format countless times over the years. It rarely works. Shalvey has found a way to make it work. He’s jostled together a few different genres of pop fiction to do so, but it works surprisingly well.
The monstrous end of Shalvey’s work looks kind of like something that might have come out of renderings from a medical textbook. It’s like Gray’s Anatomy from Hell. The dramatic end of things plays out in a quick staccato. The conversation between Jack and the suit plays out in fast alternating headshots that feel a lot more effective than they have any right to be. The sudden explosion of action that Shalvey detonates onto the page is handled with a brilliant sense of exactly where to place the action on the page.
Shalvey isn’t doing anything terribly original with the series. Taken on their own, all of the different plot elements in the issue have been seen before. It’s the way that Shalvey is placing them on the page and juxtaposing them against each other–THAT is what makes Old Dog what it is. Given the right momentum, Shalvey could really do something with the series. The current plot arc ends with the sixth issue. It’s been a fun ride so far. If Shalvey can stick the landing on the sixth issue, Old Dog might turn into something great.
