Beautiful Setpieces
Hickman's bimonthly historical fiction treat is back again and it's just as beautiful and confusing as ever.
I think that top honors should go to the art by Dustin Weaver in this book. Two scenes in particular really caught my eye: The trial scene where DaVinci and Newton's thoughts and motivations were made clear and the gorgeous page where the elixir of life is drained to nothing. Both scenes had a fantastic sense of scale that was just awesome to look at. I also really love the processing done to render the Star Child. His non-human, celestial look is both non-threatening and barely contained in an interestingly menacing way. Every time I see the Star Child I'm filled with dread and that's pretty awesome.
On the writing side we're about 1/3 of the way through the concluding half of this series and I feel like we're barreling toward a finale. It takes multiple readings for me to be able to parse out exactly what's happening in a given issue, but Hickman's characterization remains spot on. The scene I mentioned before with the trial had equally fantastic writing as DaVinci and Newton's motivations were revealed. Very interesting and well-written.
SHIELD is not a book to be taken lightly, but I'm absolutely loving it. I can't wait to see how all of this fantastic fiction ties in with the SHIELD we all know and love. Secret Warriors and even F4/FF have made vague, opaque references to this book, but we'll see how Hickman ties it all together.
