Mind MGMT #22 (Dark Horse)
Story and Art by: Matt Kindt
To read Mind MGMT #22, like the series in general, is to fall under the spell of creator Matt Kindt He is a master storyteller and even if you don’t know what’s going on all the time you are hypnotized by the painted pictures he provides and suddenly you’re ten pages in before you know it.
Most of the issue is told from the perspective of an ex-agent named The Magician as she recounts the early days of Mind Management. She goes into great detail about her time with a radical group of operatives determined to bend and break the political landscape within Europe with varying methods some of them deadly. This is where you can sense Kindt enters a zone, a sort of literary hot streak, where the words, the story just takes a life of its own and just flows out of the character in a perfectly natural way and it envelopes the reader. The old days were certainly ruthless and subversive at Mind Management.
As with other issues there are nuances and subtext that you’ll find with repeated readings but one of the neat things is the writing on the side of the pages. A kind of subliminal messaging that supplements the story but only slightly. The world of Mind MGMT has many moving pieces full of shady characters and to get lost in it is to get lost in the mind of Matt Kindt. It is worth the journey.