Pearl #4
JinxWorld/DC Comics
Words by: Brian Michael Bendis
Art by: Michael Gaydos
Color by: Michael Gaydos
Letters by: Joshua Reed
Pearl delivers on the potential that has been brewing for some time now. It finally moves away from the haphazard mystery aspect, which was more confusing than intriguing. I have been waiting for Bendis and Gaydos to ditch that and start answering their own questions.
One of the things that they did was start explaining who Pearl is. They still keep a lot about her a mystery but didn’t add anymore which was making the story sluggish and disorienting. With the revelations starting to emerge, we know that Pearl is someone formidable.
Bendis moved away from the heavy dialog and switched to a quick delivery. By doing this the story moved at the faster pace and matched the theme that the series was trying to break into from the first issue. By understanding the flow and letting the characters write themselves, Bendis unleashed his writing on Pearl.
Not to be outdone, Gaydos was able to give his characters the emotional range they were lacking. By adding small features to Pearl, Kim or Mr. Mike, we see them as human then the static pictures we got accustomed too. This was most evident with background characters. Before they were near featureless but now we can call them apart and see emotions and expressions.
I was one of the few who wasn’t all onboard this comic each issue. I loved the concept, setting, characters, and themes. It felt that Bendis and Gaydos were lost in narrowing down what they wanted it all to be. But we finally get an issue that ties that’s keeping the good, while slowly eliminating the bad at the same time. This hopefully isn’t a one-off but the continuation of a great story that took a little development to get there.