There are a couple of things that fall by the wayside when people are measuring whether a comic run is successful or not: consistency and simplicity. The former is underrated because when something is long-running enough, it really has to keep improving in order to stay as good, as there’s a lot of good stuff, and there are other things to pay attention to. The latter is easy to ignore because how do you even measure simplicity? Since it’s difficult to, it’s easier to measure its lack of complexity, which then starts to sound like an insult, when really it isn’t, especially compared to the overly complicated nonsense that the superhero genre is currently mired in.
All of which is to say, this new volume of Silk is—like the last two volumes—about as consistent and simple as possible, in the best way.
Marvel Comics
The simplity is hard to really point to or define, but it really is refreshing against the deluge of superhero stories that can’t help but be complicated based on their decades of history. The meta-story has become the main thread in so many cases that, even when someone tries to avoid it it’s still at the fore because that’s all there’s left to say about a lot of these characters. The only enemy left for Batman or Spider-Man to fight are their writers and the corporations that own them (if only they could beat them, they’d be allowed to die peacefully).
Silk doesn’t have that problem, or at least, doesn’t have it nearly as bad. She can fight a night demon being summoned by a villain she’s been fighting for fifteen issues and the stakes feel right. It gets to be a more basic superhero story and still feel meaningful, she hasn’t been in comics since the concept of a teenager was invented. There’s a lot of juice left in Cindy Moon as a character, and by telling these more simple stories, that juice gets to stick around longer.
This book is good because it has such a distilled and focused idea of what a superhero comics should be, and leans on that familiarity to the perfect degree. You’ve got your hero, recurring villains (who aren’t just flat caricatures!), a supporting cast, and a nice cameo. The competency doesn’t just end there, but so much of the success stems from sticking to the formula and executing at a high level.
Marvel Comics
A lot of that competency shines through in the consistency though, to the point that Silk probably stands pretty highly in the last few years of comics. The publishing schedule for this hasn’t been advertised really at all, but being a quiet series of minis has allowed Emily Kim, Maurene Goo, (the greatly missed here) Takeshi Miyazawa, and Ig Guara to tell a story across fifteen issues in a cool way. While Marvel continues its terrible trend of putting out too many books that don’t sell well, and the page counts on these minis continue to shrink and dwindle, I wish more books would adopt the publishing schedule of Silk. It’s been able to maintain some consistency, but also just having the book present yearly has been nice, even if it isn’t a monthly ongoing.
I hope it continues, because it’s been a book I’ve looked forward to for the last few years. Silk is a character and a book that seemingly exists to make me happy roughly once a year, and that’s great, to me.
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