East of West #4

East of West #4 

Jonathan Hickman: writer
Nick Dragotta: artist

Solicitation & Preview

Review
Here is my "problem" with East of West: I can tell this is a comic best appreciated when taking it all in at once. So while the monthly appearance of it on my pull list is enjoyed, I am finding that I always have to play catch-up with it each month.

Is that a good problem, or what? Once we get past that nonsense, this book delivers in a big epic scope that truly takes a couple of reads to fully appreciate.

The thought just occurred to me that there is one excellent way to describe the writing: how Brian Azzarello should write. Azzarello is very sparing with putting words into character's mouths, and all the characters have a way of sounding the same. While the characters in East of West might not sound too different at times from each other, Hickman manages to capture an always pleasant play on words with each character without resorting to ending the page or panel with a character cut off in mid sentence only to have the rest of it finish elsewhere in a punny manner.

The art is a little tricky for me in this issue. Usually I enjoy every detail of each panel, but for this issue I was a little weird-ed out. I say that because it opened showing the grandness of where the battle for the issue will take place. It looked like a lot of room for the characters to wage war. Unfortunately, each of the following pages made the battle seem really up close and personal, which lost a big of the grand scale that this was supposed to be for me.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it, but it just didn't have that feeling of scale that I thought it showed at first. There were some interesting framing and panel work done in this issue that showed the expansiveness of the individual violence, but there weren't too many times I felt I was one a huge battlefield. Granted, this is essentially an army versus 3 other characters, and maybe that was part of the reason for it being so up close to me.

I think this book will be one that I will enjoy more from when I get it in trade, which will probably happen after the first trade comes out.

Grades
Words: 8/10
Pictures: 8/10
General Feeling After Reading: Whew.
Buy Next Issue: Where will it go next?