Napalm Lullaby #5 // Review
Sarah’s just been pulled out of total blackness by a woman in white. (Sarah’s dressed all in black. That includes the helmet that covers her eyes.) The Sarah’s really, really upset. Turns out the woman in white is her mother...and she’s called her there to help her save the life of her father. Family gets really, really complicated in Napalm Lullaby #5. Writer Rick Remender continues a fun action fantasy series with artist Bengal. There’s a sharp poetry to what Remender and Bengal are bringing to the page. That poetry breathes quite competently through the pulse of an engrossing story.
The religion that would take over the world was started as an attempt to dodge taxes. Of course...people didn’t necessarily know that later-on. A lot of what was known about the world before the current regime had been destroyed. And now a single mother must tell it all to the children she had to let go because of so many problems with politics and the maddeningly persistent problems with women still remaining second-class citizens. Then the glorious leader lost himself in chaos and something had to be done. He was subdued and placed in a VR chamber to be reprogrammed. Now Sara is being asked to help save him.
Remender a mixes contemporary social satire with a very sharp sort of a family drama. The author balances the halves of the story with a very careful hand. Much of what's being delivered is in the form of. exposition. as a result, it feels a little stiff as a single issue. As a part of the larger series, it does fill in a few holes here and there. It also has serious ramifications for that has been told so far. So it has considerable weight to it. But only in relation to the rest of this series.
Thankfully, Bengal does a good job of laying out the exposition. It's actually a very beautiful sense of layout and design. It could have come across as temple series of panels with narration cluttering-up the edges in little boxes. Bengal avoids the visual cliches of delivering backstory in comic book panels by gracefully sprawling the story out on the page and silent panels, which are accompanied by text on a white background. It’s a nice effect that clearly delineates the reality of the now against the narrative of the backstory.
Remender does a pretty good job of taking an alien world of a dark future for humanity and makes it look totally plausible. That’s not an easy thing to do. So often sci-fi authors fumble over any explanation for the darkened state of affairs in their stories in favor of getting down to the rhythm of the action and drama at the center of what they’re bringing to the page. Remender knows what he’s doing here and it feels sharp. Furthermore--he knows what Bengal can bring to the page and allows the artist to do beautiful work with little illustrations the render a profound feeling of depth to the world he’s creating.
