Satellite Sam #5

Writer Matt Fraction Artist Howard Chaykin

 

Matt Fraction is really dirty, and I for one am glad that I live in the same universe where the Sex Criminals writer is also delivering the goods on Fantastic Four. The medium of comic books at large has really expanded over the last year or two, with titles like Sex Criminals and Satellite Sam being in the same healthy universe as Fantastic Four and FF. It also means that Fraction is a busy man, who is taking on a horde of different books. Most of them have still have been quite entertaining in spite of the tall workload that the man has been consistently delivering. Satellite Sam has been really amusing over the past issues, but it has one flaw that is very hard to overlook. Many characters look very similar, to the point where they are very difficult to pick apart in each scene. This is especially disappointing, because the writing is so good that losing track of the plot is an easy thing to do. It is also hard to get a handle on a book that does not have pre-established characters in it. The easiest way to fix this would have to be a certain number of character tabs on each scene.

 

Writing

If there is any one thing to take away from this issue, it’s that comics can be the flat out boldest medium in popular culture. Due to it’s nature this makes an easy comparison to something on the television waves like the Newsroom or even Mad Men, yet this book continues to have more soul than both properties. Fraction lets go of his mind on every page and delivers some dialogue that would make resident awful human being; Don Draper turn blue in the face. This is hands down one of the most depressing issues that I have ever read. A soap opera eventually gets dull by nature, and watching Michael stumble through the book is painful. It is however appropriate, as some truly horrible things have happened to him over the past couple of installments. How much further can the character fall, or stumble into a bottle before it is simply too late. These are interesting questions that make readers want to continue reading the book into the near future.

 

Art

 

Even though the art does have the major flaw of being hard to pick out the different character in the book, everything looks really engaging. Covers are dirty, in the undeniably great Howard Chaykin esque manner, it is just great to have a writer pointing the artist in a direction that is steering towards greatness. The artist gives little detail in most cases, but everything that is on the pain really shines through. There are many layers within each page, giving the book a sense of weight that is really entertaining to look at. When the mind see’s an image in black and white, it attempts to fill the different colors in. With all of the different textures running through each page, Chaykin is assisting the naked eye towards better understanding of each page.

 

Conclusion

Fraction and Chaykin explore some several different layers of dirt in Satellite Sam that will cause a black cloud to loom over readers upon finishing the issue. I hate that I love this book.