“PAUSE #2” – Moving In Slow Motion (REVIEW)
Image: Storm King Comics
Our readers from last year will have seen our review of “Pause #1”, from John Carpenter's Tales of Science Fiction. For those who haven’t, and anyone needing a refresher, follow the link HERE. Issue one hit shelves in February, and later this month we’ll see the release of the second issue for this six-issue miniseries.
Written by Matthew Manning and illustrations by Conor Boyle, “Pause #2” continues the story of Henry Jacobs, a man trapped in a frozen moment of time with the additional ability to unfreeze individual people or things with a single touch. The last issue ended with him discovering his frozen brother Derrick, having been stabbed, in what appeared to be a mugging. The majority of this issue covers them trying to save his life after unfreezing him.
The overarching issue explored is Henry's ‘Midas-touch-like’ ability to unfreeze things. Literally, anything he even briefly touches with his bare skin is unfrozen, and since he has no way to turn it off, he has to learn to be careful about precisely what he touches. Especially since there also doesn’t appear to be a way to undo the effect and re-freeze a subject. The process of his trying to get help for his brother also shows the limitations of such an ability, as many things are still useless even when unfrozen. For example, a door intercom isn’t much use if there isn’t anyone unfrozen on the other end to unlock the door.
Additionally, they appear to be setting up a small group of people with various personalities to explore the frozen world from different perspectives. The initial duo of Henry and Halima are joined by Henry’s brother Derrick, and Derrick’s friend Jack Tompkins. Both of these newcomers are remotely implied to have some sort of criminal connection, since Derrick insists he can’t go to a hospital for his stab wound, and Derrick is shown to be a rough, aggressive man who has ‘medical training’. Unfortunately, that is about as much as they are characterised, which only brings them on par with Henry and Halima, who also have no additional characterisation of significant depth added to them. Without any semblance of further character details or history, it is hard to invest the events of their present. So, the main event of Derrick’s medical emergency carries little to no weight, because we’ve yet to be given any significance to his relationship with Henry that would give investment in whether Derrick lives or dies.
So aside from introducing new characters, there isn’t much else that happens of particular significance. In a longer series, this may be forgiven because it would be part of a longer game slowly building a rapport between the characters and the familiarity and immersion within a frozen world. However, by the end of this issue, we are through a third of the story. With there only being six issues to tell the full story it feels like a waste to have an issue that is largely spinning its wheels. It isn’t expected that they have any time to waste. After having a rather concisely paced first issue, the second issue feels like the story has gone into slow motion.
If the intent was to set up smaller elements that will pay off later, those feel wanting as well. There is a ham-fisted focus on a seemingly unconnected news headline, which had also subtly featured in the first issue. Though in the first issue that had felt special. It was a detail that was easily overlooked, so if it later proved to be significant, it would be rewarding for the observant. However, the second issue gives a heavy focus to the same headline in the final frame, with the air of a cliffhanger. This falls flat since literally nothing up until now has even been remotely connected with the headline, and there is nothing notable about it to think it is anything but a regular news article. Maybe if there was more known about Henry, we could speculate on the significance between the news story and himself, but we don’t so it is just compounding unrelated shallow elements, rather than creating depth through linking information.
Even a simple anecdote of Henry’s and Derrick’s shared history could have brought significance to the issue. But instead, it feels like an issue you could accidentally skip and might not even notice. However, time will tell if all of this turns out to be cleverer and/or more complicated than I’m giving it credit for.
“Pause #2” – on sale from March 26
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