If he wants to leave The Big Wait, Bill has to somehow find a way to work with the one person he hates most in all of Creation. It’s time to meet Slim.
Heavy #2 has a lot more fun with the dimension-hopping angle seen in the first issue, but it also takes plenty of time to unpack the shared history between the lead characters. The heart-to-heart that Slim and Bill have is possibly the most challenging scenes of the series so far. It’s hard to reconcile the version of Slim we see here with the gleeful and chaotic killer in the rest of the book. It’s also hard to tell what the goal is here, or what the reader is supposed to make of Slim in this moment.
Max Bemis’s work has always been full of explorations of problematic characters who confront their illnesses head-on, which I do respect. There’s very rarely a pure black-and-white line in his writing. However, I’m not fully convinced that Slim is salvageable — but maybe that’s the point. Regardless, I am looking forward to seeing how this aspect of the story is fleshed out in later issues.
That’s not to say that the whole issue is spent on (pun unintended) heavier topics. There’s also a battle with giant monsters made of, um, reproductive fluids. Yes, it’s as gross and gratuitous as you’d expect. Luckily, this is one situation where it helps to have the characters commenting on how absurd and gross their mission is. This sequence definitely makes for some of the weirdest and most disgusting visuals of the series so far, but it’s good to know that the characters involved are also having none of it.
What isn’t so great is when Bill makes homophobic remarks toward Slim. Yes, it’s lampshaded by Slim calling Bill out on being significantly uncool, but this doesn’t do too much to make Bill very likable. Maybe that was the point, but in an issue full of shock humor and over-the-top situations, it’s the one line that seemed to fall completely flat for me.
That being said, a lot of the banter between the two lead characters is genuinely funny. There’s a montage of things going wrong on every mission, yet working out in Slim’s favor, which definitely got some laughs out of me.
Eryk Donovan and Cris Peter do a great job of bringing the various insane alternate dimensions to vibrant, colorful life for sequences that are sometimes as brief as a single panel. They cram a lot of personality into these quick glimpses at the multiverse, which makes the issue extremely fun to look at. Also worth noting are the physicality and the facial expressions of the characters, which sells a lot of the comedy, as well as the more emotional beats. There’s a great moment when Kyle can be seen in the background with her face in her palm that genuinely made me laugh harder than anything else in the issue. These small touches make such a huge difference in helping us get to know the characters.
The issue ends with an interesting reveal that seems to set the stage for a very different twist in the ongoing storyline. While some of Heavy #2 was a bit much for me, I’m still interested to see where it leads, particularly now that the leads have come to a bit more of an understanding.
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