Shipwreck evokes David Lynch to create an ominous atmosphere

Cho, who’s been criticized for his sexualized cover images of women, is at his best artistically when he’s not concentrating exclusively on covers. Skybourne #1 looks and reads like an old-school James Bond movie, more so even than Warren Ellis’ current run on the James Bond comic. Where Ellis’ Bond is very clearly a modern one, focused on technology and corporate intrigue as well as international incidents, Skybourne is more summer blockbuster than shadow government. Cho is both writing and drawing the comic, a rarity for him since he began to take work from larger publishers, and Skybourne is his first foray back into original content in a while. Unfortunately, it shows.

Skybourne #1 is without a doubt beautifully drawn. When Cho is concentrating on action and motion instead of cover art, his skill comes to the forefront instead of getting lost behind his questionable choices for poses and details. He’s got an excellent eye for realistic human anatomy, and the way he draws people in motion is compelling and dynamic. His technical skill cannot be questioned, and in the case of Skybourne it’s enhanced by excellent colors from Marcio Menyz, who has mostly worked on Dynamite titles in the past.

While the art is gorgeous, the writing is flat and uninspired. The basic storyline in this first issue is interesting, with modern weapons dealers vying for control of Excalibur and some great fight scenes. There’s even a couple of nice comedic beats, and one of the main characters, the only woman, has a wonderful moment where she gets to slaughter some men who underestimate her. But the choice for the story’s villain is odd, and there’s not enough information about them or the Skybourne family to compel readers to return for more in the second issue. It’s basically an uninterrupted series of fight scenes with dialogue so stilted and blatantly repetitive that it feels robotic. Cho’s choice to kill off the only woman in the book, who looks suspiciously like Wonder Woman and spends the entire issue getting insulted by men on the basis of her gender, feels both lazy and insulting.

If Cho had worked with a more experienced writer, this might have been an excellent book. As it is, Skybourne is dull but stunning, and at only five issues total, it might be worth picking up the whole series once it’s done. But it’s certainly not worth $4 on its own. [Caitlin Rosberg]

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Art books are as much about the artist as they are about the art. That is to say, rather than simply collecting and cataloging images, they construct a narrative about their subject—particularly when they purport to cover the artist’s entire oeuvre. They select and curate a career; they provide a snapshot that can help shape how an artist is perceived. Such is the case with The Art Of Jock (Insight Editions), which covers the titular cartoonist’s beginnings on 2000 AD through his recent work on comics like Wytches and films like Ex Machina. And here, his career is framed as one built on dynamic but discrete images rather than a sequence of images.

The book is divided into four sections: “Beginnings,” “Comics,” “Posters,” and “Film,” and it inadvertently gives the impression of an artist infatuated by comics but, ultimately, rarely involved with sequential art. Divided into three sections detailing his lurid, ink-smattered artwork (“Beginnings” being composed of text and photos of the artist at work), “Comics” is longer than the film-focused sections, “Posters” and “Films,” but only slightly, and there is a noticeable level of difference in attention paid to the subjects of film and comics.

In “Comics,” Will Dennis, The Art Of Jock’s writer, focuses almost exclusively on Jock’s breakout and high-profile work: The Losers, Scalped, Green Arrow: Year One, and Batman: The Black Mirror. That is not a wholly inaccurate representation of the cartoonist’s output, though it does largely omit smaller profile work. This career snapshot, however, argues in favor of the idea that Jock’s reputation is built largely on cover work. Each major project is given a brief explainer text, but the book mostly highlights the cover images, prominently presenting them: large and isolated. With a few exceptions, interior pages are arranged four to a page, and they are presented at a distinctly smaller size than the covers. Alternatively, the poster work and the production art are more prominently featured. Pieces are rendered at larger sizes, accompanied with more production work, and featuring more contextualizing text. The book lends these posters a greater import.

Wittingly or not, this story of Jock’s career downplays his involvement in the sequential form, but it does highlight the more compelling aspects of his work: his striking designs and kinetic linework. Filled with anarchic, visible brushstrokes, Jock’s images are bold and striking, and the gloss on the posters, in particular, highlights his commitment to formal experimentation: blowing ink to create organic-seeming corpuscles for his The Thing print, making use of the large canvas the posters provide, allowing the limitations of screen printing to guide his color choices. If you look closely enough, you can see that under his lush and spattered inks there are blocky and geometric figures. Order and chaos converge and give rise to something fast, tactile, grimy, gross; and the massive size at which the images are reproduced makes that abundantly clear. [Shea Hennum]