Advance Review: ‘Pause’ #2 Features An Effective Use Of Color

by Tom Smithyman

Overview

After a strong start, this limited series of a few New Yorkers who has become unfrozen in a paused world takes a bit of a detour in its second issue. Some innovative use of color helps to make the action – or sometimes the lack of it – more understandable for readers. But you might come away wondering what this issue is adding to the larger story.

Overall

8/10

Imagine a world where time is frozen for everyone but you. Well, you and anyone you touch. While it might seem as if it’s a dream for some, for others … it could be a nightmare.

That’s what unfrozen Henry and Halima face when they come upon Henry’s frozen brother Derrick. The very drunk Derrick was getting stabbed during a mugging when time froze. For some mysterious reason, Henry is unpaused and has the ability to unfreeze anyone he touches.

While that may sound like a good thing, unfreezing his brother when all the available medical workers are paused presents a series of problems that Henry must solve in this issue.

Through his use of color, artist Conor Boyle makes it easy for readers to understand what is moving and what’s at rest in the largely frozen New York City. He only colors those few people in motion, leaving the rest of the world in blacks, whites, and grays. It’s a simple but incredibly effective way of showing motion and rest in a static medium.

Writer Matthew K. Manning’s script for this issue is a bit more pedestrian than the first chapter. This second of six installments doesn’t seem to push the story along much – at least yet. Hopefully, Derrick’s tale will help to push the overall narrative along. But Manning ends the issue in an odd manner while apparently trying to set up the rest of the story. It’s almost as if he handed in a treatment for four issues but was told to expand it to six.