Episode 2, and Raines has already gotten sloppy.
I’m halfway through it, and not only have I gotten through the first few minutes of heavy and hamhanded exposition, I’ve also seen a bunch of characters that don’t feel true.
The msot blatant one is the police sketch artist, who:
- Starts of by talking with someone about how he doesn’t do comic books, he does graphic novels. I write comics. I publish comics. I’m the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel. I’ve talked with at least hundreds of creators of such materials over the year. Have yet to hear a one of them make that distinction about what they’re willing to do.
- Pulls up as an example of “comics” Richie Rich, and as graphic novels, Dark Knight and Sandman. Well, yes, Richie Rich is (well, was) a comic book. So was Sandman – later collected into volumes, and yes carrying a story across multiple issues, but most comics do. And Dark Knight (really, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns) can be called a graphic novel (serialized, but it has been seen more collected in a single volume), but if you’re going to be snotty about what you do, you probably won’t use as your example a Batman story.
- When drawing the perp, he ends up drawing Erik Estrada, and gets picked on for having only that one image of Latinos. He’s a police artist in Los Angeles. According to the 2005 census, Los Angeles is 46.8% of Latino or Hispanic origin.
I was hoping this series would build well from its pilot. But perhaps the pilot will be the pinnacle it will never achieve again. I hope to find otherwise. Graham Yost, I expect a lot of you.
yeah, weak episode. i was also annoyed by the comic book nerd/sketch artist bit…
on the other hand, ‘Andy Barker, P.I.’ was quite funny!