The Scorched #37 // Review
Jessica Prieta is about to die. Sort of. She’s just lost an arm. She’s not doing well. She’s asked for a former priest to deliver her last rites. He’s seen so much that’s caused Hine to reject his faith, but he’s going to try to connect with the deity in The Scorched #37. Writer John Layman, artist Stephen Segovia and colorist Dinei Ribeiro. place some drama between moments of over-the-top action, and an issue that explores a little bit of the emotion behind all of the brutality. It’s not terribly insightful stuff, but it is interesting enough to keep the action moving into the next major brutal issue.
It’s a bit strange to have a moment of prayer right in the middle of everything before people get slaughtered. But it makes about as much sense as anything does. Especially to a priest, who isn’t really necessarily all that enamored with the heaven and what it’s doing. so many of those with demonic power are in a very bad way. There’s been a lot of bloodshed. Things are almost certainly hopeless. At least initially. Jessica seems to know something, though. There’s no way she would be asking for last rites if she didn’t know something that the priest doesn’t.
The finer points of what is going on here are kind of lost in the formlessness of the action.The Spawn Universe is a relatively strange place for gods and angels and devils and things like that. It’s hard to really get a clear read on what’s going on with respect to bigger themes that usually cascade around the base is sort of a subject matter. The purity of good versus evil is a Lost and it just seems like a lot of people with a lot of power just strangling each other and beating each other. It becomes silly and slapstick after a while.
Not that the art is presenting it as silliness or slapstick at all. It’s definitely the salad over the top.McFarlane/Liefeld-style action that hits the page with some particularly good atmosphere thanks to the coloring of Ribeiro. Honestly, it’s the color that does a lot of work in selling the book as being anything other than a big sloppy mass. That atmospheric definition between blood spell splatter and jumpsuit and clerical collar really add the kind of atmosphere. That’s absolutely necessary for any of this to make any sense at all.
And things move onto another direction. Things move on in a direction where they’re going to make a little bit more sense perhaps. So it’ll be interesting to see where things move from here. Once again, Jessica seems like a very interesting character. But she’s not given a whole Lotta space to do a whole heck of a lot other than being vaguely heroic, and having lost an arm and then regained it or whatever. So much for the rest of it just seems kind of strange and doesn’t really have the kind of definition of needs to really make much of an impact.
