Fast, Furious, Fun: Advance Review – ‘King Of Spies’ #3
by Olly MacNamee
Summary
Roland King continues to takes on the worst of the worst. The elite of society, the seemingly untouchable. And, because these villains echo our own real life monsters, you cannot help but cheer him on in his pursuit of revenge and retribution. But, is time finally up for our king of spies?
Overall
10/10As with the two previous issues, this penultimate issue of King of Spies season one starts off with a tense moment of high drama. In this case Roland King taking the Pope hostage and whisking him away to pay for the harm he did in covering up the many, many pedophile crimes committed by the Catholic Church, and which he helped cover up. This may be comic books, but the highly placed criminals and their sordid, seedy, savage crimes are all too real. And it’s this chiming with reality that really gets the reader on board with King’s new found desire to put right the wrongs he too held cover up and protect. Mark Millar allows King to do what we could only dream of being able to do to such vile human beings, but to an extreme level. And, as ever, it is done in Millar’s distinctive, hyperbolic style.
Of course, what prevents this from descending into nothing more than a montage of high profile killings is the plot to take King out, lead by his own son, and the weirdly wonderful and deadly amputated twins introduced last issue. King may know where the bodies are buried, but his son knows where King’s looking for those bodies.
This is a Black Ops world that artist Matteo Scalera daubs in darkness and shadow. A world colour artist Giovanni Niro helps establish and sustain with complimentary shaded of blue, with fiery yellow and reds applied as a result of the violence and accompanying explosions that keeps this issue fizzing along at quite the pace. The blacks are skilfully broken up with some seriously stunning line work that often evokes the sense of light that only adds to the often ominous nature of the scene.
Roland King projects a certain calmness about him – the kind of cool, calm but deadly air of the gentleman spy at his best – but it’s an adrenalin-fuelled issue by the close of play, thanks to the machinations of his son, determined to take him down and out well before the cancer does its work.
With so many agencies fighting agency him, can King pull off one last grand escape? And even if he does, there is the ticking time bomb that would suggest Millar could well give us a bitter-sweet ending, but one with a pretty impressive bodycount.
King of Spies #3 is out Wednesday 9th February from Image Comics
