“Behemoth”
Writer: Robbie Morrison
Artist: Tan Eng Huat
Publisher: Wildstorm/ Eye of the Storm
Tan Eng Huat turns in what is quite possibly the worst comic art I have ever seen, (and it’s in what could be called a relatively high profile book) so I have to ask: Where did the Wildstorm editorial staff find this guy? Imagine a ten year old adopting a mixture of Trevor McCarthy’s and Chris Bachalo’s styles at their most confusing and you can start to picture how horrid the art in this book is.
You want examples? I’ll give you examples. The Carrier looks like Ms. Pac Man on human growth hormone. Many of the characters appear to be sporting pig snouts in the place of noses and that adds to the androgyny of many of their faces. Apparently Huat thinks that the black leather is actually part of the Mid-Nighter’s face because he has the character’s eyes bugging out of the mask on the first page. On one panel the monster o’ the month picks up a commuter train and menaces Apollo with it while in the next panel the train is over Apollo’s head. The following panel has a borderline stick figure getting blown up (with no evidence of the train) while the Mid-Nighter yells “Apollo!” I have no idea what exactly happened, but I’m assuming Apollo was involved.
The main character’s outfits change throughout the course of the story (especially Hawksmoor’s t-shirt) and their faces look to be made out of Silly Putty. One minute there are lines over their grilles and the next someone has flattened the Putty out so they look normal. I’m still not sure what the monster looked like, but information like that isn’t important right? Anatomy, detail, action sequences, coherence, clarity, and backgrounds do not appear to be among Huat’s specialties.
The art is so bad, in fact, that I can barely bring myself to write about the story, but since that’s part of my job I’ll give it a go. There is some good here, but you won’t find it until the end. We’ve seen the “big monster attacks city” story too many times to count, and Morrison doesn’t offer anything new there. Those stories are trite even when they are done well, and this issue fails on almost every level. The identity of the monster is interesting as is the Doctor’s way of dealing with it, but the last few semi-haunting panels cannot make up for the previous 21 pages. Oh, and since when do Malaysians speak English?
I think that the maturing of Jenny Quantum has been handled well as kids start to ask tough questions when they get to be her age, but aside from that I don’t have much positive to say about Morrison’s writing in this issue or even up to this point. Case in point, I’m still waiting for one issue to go by where he doesn’t beat us over the head with Apollo’s and Mid-Nighter’s sexuality. The success attributed to Warren Ellis and Mark Millar in regards to getting the public to accept their relationship had to do with the subtle ways they incorporated it. Very rarely did the two make crude jokes about sex, and that seems to be the only way Morrison knows how to include the characters’s love life.
Finally, I have to comment on the action driven scenes in this issue. Razak (the monster’s name) is attacking Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, otherwise known as the tallest buildings in the world. For those of you that don’t recognize that name, the towers are placed side by side on a north-south axis, and could be considered a symbol of the city. Morrison had to know that this issue was coming out one week to the day before the two-year anniversary of World Trade Center attacks, and that makes his inclusion of the towers more than a little offensive. There’s not an American reading this book that didn’t shudder when Hawksmoor yells “We’re losing the North Tower!” or cringe when said tower starts to collapse. The symbolism of a monster attacking two tall spires isn’t all that hard to crack, and Morrison should be ashamed of himself. I realize that violence is part of the makeup of The Authority, but the inclusion of the Petronas Towers so close to September 11 cannot be a coincidence.
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