A very engaging and entertainment hard boiled comicy about an aspiring film star Faith Fallon and the dark story that surrounds her. Faith Fallon was once Dorothy an actress who had a part in a play about a child killer. Dorothy made a serious mistake and was punished for it. She leaves New York for Hollywood where embarks on her journey to be Faith Fallon, star.
Steven Pennella’s extraordinary art dominates the story and rightfully so.The art is a deeply considered mix of 3-D modelling, drawing and carefully placed and paced panels. Any page has multiple elements which strongly support the story structure.
Steven Pennella has taken a considerable risk with the structure of the story, it is split across the cast and time, shifting as it unfurls to capture the elements of the story. This has considerable potential to be messy at best and simply confusing at worst, the combination of the art and story structure make for a satisfying whole.The art can support the various narrative threads and provide a context for each one so that the reader is never stranded. The multiple narratives in turn provide a framework for the art to rest on and make sense of the mosaic that the reader is presented with on each page.
It is the story itself that is the key element to the comic and in particular the lead character Faith Fallon herself. She is a wonderful lead character, she has the bottomless drive and will to achieve her aims that captures the reader. She is never a passive recipient of events, to the fullest extent of her power she is shaping and pushing them. What provides the energy in the book is that she is pushing against a cast as fully committed to their own ends as Faith is to hers. Where those interests coincide they cooperate, where they do no they actively work against each other. This makes for a story that is constantly shifting and moving, it is restless and engaging, the reveals are cunningly staged to alter the reading and understanding of what went before or what will come in the future.
Hard boiled is a difficult genre to get right, the utter lack of empathy that the cast have to have to act the way they do can be draining for a reader. Action is vital, like sharks a hard boiled cast have to be constantly in motion to bring the reader along with them. What they lack in sympathy they make up with for in energetic greed and brutal resolve.
Steven Pennella has captured the moving spitit of hard boiled stories with care and precision, his cast are engagingly rapacious and the stunning art gives him the room to mix up the narrative so that the cast have plenty of room to demand and hold the reader. Faith Fallon is a gripping comic and an intriguing hard boiled mystery story, a wonderful combination.
Chief Wizard Note: These are review copies very kindly sent by Steven Pennella, to purchase Faith Fallon and you should to have the deep pleasure that only creativity and craft deliveries, they are available from .
