Unit 44 #5

Okay, to be fair, this concept isn’t a good one. Unit 44's first four issues are a complete story told in four parts. I put the mega issue down and genuinely did not want more, in the best way possible. So when I found out that that more Unit 44 had been released I was... cautious. Skeptical. How do you follow up something that I think is this close to objectively perfect? By the description it didn't sound like they were continuing the major storylines from the first four issues, but I could be wrong? So I bought, hoping that lightning would get into the bottle again.

It didn't.

But it's still damn good.

Issue Five follows our favorite numbnuts as they try to pick apart what's going on with what's obviously a cult. There's some great hijinks, a stubborn persistence in not spoiling exactly how the cult is being mind-controlled (no, it's not what they're saying in the book, and props to the writer and artist on showing that), and some of the funniest pie humor I'll ever read.

I mean, has anyone actually ever had a raisin pie? Let me know if you have.

First off, the art duties switched to a new guy. I don't hate him. I don't particularly love him, either. He's got a good sense of composition, some of his facial expressions are absolutely hilarious, and he's got a good sense of who and what the characters are. He manages to copy what made them so distinctive to begin with, and puts his own spin on it all. I respect that. I just don't think he's as good as Jimenez, the original artist. 

Locher's script is where this all hinges on, and it just doesn't hit the same high notes as the original run. The story is funny, and there's some great gags thrown in there that definitely made me laugh, but it's just not as side-splittingly hilarious as the original run. I find that regrettable, but again, it's hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice. This was still a good comic, I still liked the story, but the downshift is really hard to ignore.

That being said, the last two to three pages of the main story is worth the price of the comic alone.

Will I get more Unit 44. Absolutely! This stuff still makes me laugh and it's nice to be able to do that. But it's simply not the same to me. The art, the writing, it's all competent, and gets the job done. But this isn't practically divinely inspired, like the first four issues. Still worth my money, but I'm not going to pretend that this is anywhere near the original run.

That being said, I need to try raisin pie now.

Unit 44: Alterna Giant 1

GIBSON: Wait a sec.. we still have an off-site storage unit?

HATCH: You mean the one that holds the cosmos cannons, the Roswell corpses, and one hundred other government secrets that wouldn't fit into one of our underground bunkers? YES. You have been paying the rent bill, right?

GIBSON: HRM. Well... you see... Hatch...

AUCTIONEER: Going once... going twice... SOLD!!!

If that doesn't make you chuckle there's something wrong. 

And yes, a common storage shed.

Yes, Area 51 put over a hundred top secret things into common. Freaking. Storage. Shed.

Okay, look, I belly laughed at that exchange. A tear may have been shed. Nobody, ever, in any part of the government, has ever had that type of conversation. Ever. Nope. Never happened. The sheer incompetence here is so normal in a real government setting, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash without the "Area 51" in there. I hope they don't actually have those kinds of discussions there but... well... they probably do.

And yes, the comic only gets better from there. Special agents Gibson and Hatch then bumble their way through  a plot decades in the making, as old grievances come to light. And I laughed my ass off at practically every page of this 96 page craziness. For five bucks I laughed and laughed and laughed. This is well written, really freaking clever. It's subversive without being disrespectful and cruel without being perversely so. It takes work to be this simple when writing. There's parts of this story where I could almost viscerally feel the restraint on display: tell the story, tell the joke, and that's it. Wes Locher, the writer, probably was up to his eyeballs in jokes that he removed from the script because they just would have distracted. My hat's off to him.

The art normally wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but I REALLY liked the story-telling chops. Everything is more than clear, more than easy to read: in some cases the layouts are just absolutely inspired. Yes, I used that word. Yes I meant it. @ me. Go ahead. The layouts are really well done. I can absolutely read every page of this without even needing to squint to check it.

Okay I lied, there's one page in the ninety-six I found confusing. One. Sorry about that. So 95 of the 96 pages I found to be pristinely laid out. Not absolutely all of them.

I think the thing that really sold me, though, was that both Locher and Jimenez actually gave a crap about the characters themselves. This would have been a really easy premise to screw up. Something this simple would have been easy to phone in; the utmost care is necessary to make sure each character feels right. And that happens here. Gibson and Hatch are just the right amounts of zany and serious, thoughtful and dumb. Again, I feel like there's just whole reams of character work sitting in Locher's writing room, with Jimenez having an equal amount of character sketches. I don't know if that's the case, but I sure can sense mastery of craft.

Unit 44’s first Giant collection is flat out hilarious and well-drawn. This is one of those rare acts of restraint that can only be done by someone who has done the work. Each part is deliberately placed. It's not too much, at any point, but just right. There's very few things I just outright recommend, but this one it's easy to do so. Unit 44 is absolutely worth your time. It certainly was mine.