Dejah Thoris #4 Review

Written by: Amy Chu

Illustrated by: Pasquale Qualano

Colored by: Valentina Pinto

Lettered by: Thomas Napolitano

Published by: Dynamite

My review for this month’s issue will be pretty brief, mostly because, even though the storyline is progressing, it still feels like not much happened in the issue. I know we live in an age of decompressed storytelling, but I still want to enjoy the issue I’m reading and feel like it has some forward progression.

The issue starts off well enough: Dejah Thoris was able to convince the green martian Nars Jartas to show her what he thinks is the location she is searching: the lost city of Ephysium where their goal, to discover water, will be realized. We now have the premise of this issue: finding the city of Ephysium as they descend into the earth to find it. However, this is where the decompressed storytelling gets on my nerves: the descent itself, which should have taken no more than a couple of pages, takes up a whopping 6 pages (more than a quarter of the issue).

From there, the exploration takes 6 pages, add to that a full-page spread, and finally the disturbing element takes up the last 6 pages. To be fair to Chu, this is happening a lot more frequently in comics these days, but it was way too noticeable in this particular issue of Dejah Thoris not to mention.

The art from Pasquale Qualano and colors by Pinto continue to be good every month and I will say, they are very consistent, so I will give good marks there. Where I will take some marks away is the two-page spread: usually you want something epic in that spread, but instead we get a very generic and simple background art.