Sheena Queen of the Jungle #8 Review

Written by: Marguerite Bennett and Christina Trujillo

Art by: Maria Sanapo

Color: Ceci De La Cruz

Letters by: Thomas Napolitano

Published by: Dynamite

Last issue saw Sheena and her companion Lirio captured by Cadwell Industries as they were seeking the witch of the forest, who turned out to be potentially her mother. This issue finds Sheena waking up at Caldwell Industries’ auxiliary research lab, chained up, in a cage and to add insult to injury, with a bracelet that conducts electricity if she so much as tries to escape.

From here, the issue’s main focus seems to be a lot of preening first from Laurie, the main scientist we’ve seen in previous issues, followed by Mr. Cadwell himself. In both instances, the dialogue is just short of maniacal evil explaining their evil plan to Sheena all while threatening Sheena with an awful choice. Though this comic is clearly a call back to old-school pulp adventures, some of the choices that are made when it comes to the villains and their dialogue are a little suspect at times, and downright bad in other instances.

And that’s basically it for the plot of this issue. It felt a lot like what you see on some TV shows who have a “bottle episode”: limited scenes and all about the dialogue.

The art for this issue was probably some of the weakest of the series up to date. I’ve enjoyed some of the previous issues with Sanapo, but this issue there was some glaring mistakes that ranged from weird facial features (in one panel, Laurie the scientist has the equivalent of a smiley face instead of a fully drawn face), to very odd composition (Sheena breaking out of the cage has some really awful perspective). The strangest part is, you know Sanapo has the talent since all of her covers up to date have been amazing. It just hasn’t translated in the interior work.

At this point, I’m not sure if the editorial team is really doing their job correctly because a lot of this should have been caught at the editorial phase. This isn’t just limited to the art, however. At points there are missed grammar mistakes as well as missed speech balloons. It’s always regrettable seeing these types of mistakes in a bigger publisher like Dynamite and I hope this gets fixed in the trade/digital issues as well as future issues.