Page 45 Review by Stephen
I believe this was the biggest-selling series in America last year, and I can see why:
a) it's based on a very popular game franchise, bridging the gap between the first two outings, and
b) Liam Sharp. The monsters are enormous. They're monstrous! They get bigger!! And even more monstrous!!!
Of course they do: that's how video games work. First you slaughter a load of grunts, then you get an end-of level boss. Then you find a vehicle some other character drives with a chain gun on the front or rear so you can slaughter a lot of other grunts en route. Then you encounter a lot of nastier beasts, pilot a helicopter, encounter a bio-mechanical variation of whatever creatures you've previously immolated, find some survivors, protect those survivors, and then the really nasty fuckers turn up. Scenery 'splodes, the roof caves in, the floor caves in and you wish you'd selected the grappling gun five minutes earlier for your level-up.
Reload.
Joshua Ortega writes games. You can tell he does because this follows their formulae to the letter complete with traumatic flashbacks so that you, a squared-eyed, pot-bellied stoner with biceps the size of a sparrow's knee-caps can feel empathy for your avatar who has the build of a Giant Redwood.
At which point let us return to Liam Sharp: you couldn't pick a more apposite artist for a work like this. He's been compared to Jim Lee, and quite fairly too because his figures often share the same neo-classical proportions but he's somehow warmer and, well, hulkier. He's been compared to Simon Bisley which to me is completely unfair because I don't see unkindness to women in Liam's work at all. He rather relishes women as anyone who's seen his Bazza-Windsor-Smythe-like warrior women will know. And as for the non-nubile scenery on offer, his landscapes are delicious. Post-apocalyptic and bombed to buggery, but delicious all the same. And when it comes to the carnage, he's the visual equivalent of Chaucer in The Knights Tale. Man, that guy knew his slice-and-dice onomatopoeia! Thankfully they've let Sharp ink his own pencils this time, and with the sympathetic colouring of Jonny Ranch and Carrie Strachan, it makes all the difference. I'm sure he got an absolute blast letting loose on this series because it bloody well shows. I just think that if you do hire someone of Sharp's talents then you should have the decency to provide him with a script. Which brings us to:
c) there's nothing here to tax the brain.
Yee-haw!
