Old Dog #6 // Review
Jack Lynch is having a casual talk with his daughter along the coast of Ireland. It’s a beautiful day in County Clare. Evidently, it’s Jack’s ancestral home, which means that it’s his daughter’s as well. They might have a lot to talk about. It would help if he didn’t have a gun in one hand and an axe in the other. Things might have gotten off on the wrong foot in Old Dog #6. Writer/artist Declan Shalvey continues his brutal and aggressive action/espionage thriller in another appealing chapter. The tired, old warrior trope is as fun as ever at the beginning of a whole new adventure.
Keelin didn’t exactly come in under the radar. Black Circle knows that she’s going to Jack. And there’s like...a WHOLE LOT of history with Jack that would be easier to push under any available rug if they just...y’know...got rid of Jack. That’s a lot easier to do out in the middle of nowhere on the coast of Ireland. He’s asking her to go because he knows that her life won’t be worth much when she’s hanging out with him. He tells her to leave. She does. She won’t be far, though. She’ll be watching.
Shalvey’s plot for the issue starts out with a pretty simple sort of family drama that’s been somewhat gracefully welded into an action espionage story. Then, Jack goes all Rambo/Wolverine on a group of allegedly advanced military elite operatives. So, everything is perfectly normal and everything...but then it all gets completely, irretrievably, and beautifully...derailed. There’s a big revelation at the end that turns the entire series inside out in a way that shows it to be something much more than another tedious action drama. Shalvey is working with something very interesting here.
Shalvey’s art is clean and brutal without a whole lot of extra detail to clutter aggression or emotion. It’s all there on the page, and you can see it from across the room. Some of what Shalvey’s putting down is almost poetically framed with some very beautiful composition...whether it’s a silent moment between Keelin and Jack or some nameless guy taking an axe to the chest. There are silent moments. There are aggressive moments. There are aggressively silent moments. And there’s everything else. The color has some very vivid moments as well. Blood is so clearly visible, which makes for an interesting contrast to the mystery buried in the story.
Shalvey takes a hell of a chance with the action on the surface. There really isn’t much that’s truly engaging about the action aside from its brutality. This IS the end of a major plot arc and the beginning of another, but it’s got so much depth and weight to it that doesn’t appear until issue’s end. He’s really running a risk of boring the hell out of the type of person who might otherwise love the weird mind-bender of an ending that hammers into the last few pages.
