Sickness isn’t always a linear experience.
Take the common cold, for instance. You can become sick, start to feel better, and then get worse — it’s often the sign of some secondary bacterial infection. Ain’t the human body just a wondrous nightmare?
In the case of Dark Honor, though, the problem ain’t exactly bronchitis.
This “COVID crime caper” started off sick enough. Yet despite a cool premise — the warrior guardians (aka The Hundred) of NYC’s five crime families battle the wily Grigor for control amid the pandemic — there were consistency and commitment issues almost immediately.
Dark Honor issues #2 and #3 saw the book on the mend, with the writers (including Brian DeCubellis, K.S. Bruce, and Ethan Sacks) using COVID as this powerful device to explore political instability, wealth inequality, the arc of human suffering, and social collapse (while still telling a compelling enough gangster story).
But Dark Honor #4 is struck by some nasty new bug likely in the form of over-confidence. There’s a sense that perhaps they’d done enough with COVID directly, and they could shift to something more immediately and viscerally satisfying. And that’s what they try to do with a big show off between Grigor and Josef (leader of The Hundred, father of Rain).
On a positive note, artist Gabriel Guzman manages to 1) maintain the same gritty intensity and overt, bloody action as previous artists — Fico Ossio and David Messina — which helps with the book’s consistency (and that counters some of its actual issues) and 2) tap into things like John Woo flicks (a la Face/Off) for a fight that’s appropriately cinematic and dramatic in all the right ways. Seriously, it’s methodical and heavy in the ways you want from, say, an ’80s action flick, but also graceful a la Equilibrium, for a clash that has real layers and textures to the sheer brutality.
Main cover variant by Fico Ossio. Courtesy of Image Comics.
The issue, then, is that there’s just as much wrong with the fight as there is joy to be culled from its bloody weapons and cracked ribs. The least worrisome parts is that it continues to diminish Rain’s role across this story. Yes, this is the penultimate issue, and letting Josef have his time to shine will only add stakes to the forthcoming Rain-Grigor confrontation.
Still, her presence has been a consistent problem across this whole series, and it feels like Rain is just moving through her own story rather than being a proper lead. In fact, she’s often another prop for these men to fight over or to treat her as some second-rate assistant. Even the big romantic tension in this book (Rain’s fling with Aja) felt like it fizzled out without her actually being involved.
But I could forget even that treatment in comparison to the two COVID-centric instances amid the Grigor-Josef brawl. The first involves the suspicious timing of Grigor’s arrival amid early COVID, something he brings to light near the duel’s conclusion. It’s never made explicitly clear if he means what he says, or if he’s just making a broad threat that seizes on people’s fear and ignorance. The fact that we don’t know for sure is less compelling and more irritating; one answer seems like a great way to play around with our relationship to COVID, and the other just feels like a couple steps too far.
Meanwhile, the other big instance actually involves how Josef ends the fight. Again, without revealing too much, it’s a gesture that speaks to the heart of COVID, and this collective reckoning we had around generational power and trauma as well as shifting views on general social structures. It’s a big, bold gesture, and one that smacks of action movie cheese but that also works brilliantly as this sharp bit of commentary.
Main cover variant by Fico Ossio. Courtesy of Image Comics.
So, it all begs the question: What made the second “moment” work better than the first? I think I hinted at it in the last paragraph, but it’s really a mix of tone, commitment, and humorous undertones. The first moment is too menacing but it’s also a bit nebulous; if it were more clear regarding the proper Grigor-COVID connection, that might be awful but at least it’d commit to some bit.
The second moment is maybe a touch dramatic in its messaging about who lives and who dies in modern society, but it is 1,000% committed and is also deeply, darkly funny (to enough people, at least). There’s also another, smaller COVID-centric moment that, while not worth discussing with too much significance, involves one of the men saying they could kill the other even with a COVID fever.
And that last tiny moment speaks to what I’ve been getting at: You can talk about something terrible like COVID, and use it for a story about social change (as well as the grief that accompanies these tectonic shifts) if you thread the needle just right. And that means being bold when you have to, bringing the reader into the whole thing everytime, and knowing what we can laugh at and what remains too sensitive. Dark Honor #4 really represented some of the best and worst of this complicated process.
That’s precisely why I’m not exactly excited about the prospects for Dark Honor #5. Part of me thinks that, given the Rain vs. Grigor fight that’s on the horizon, there’s not a ton of COVID-centric thematic exploration remaining. Which would be a crime, because even if this book has bungled some of that in key parts, the whole depiction has been refreshing and exciting. This book’s work to be the first proper “COVID comic” kept me going even when my stomach felt queasy. Through an imperfect approach, Dark Honor was trying to honor this pillar of shared pain and to try and learn something, anything from the experience.
What I don’t want is more half-cocked action movie slop (even if, again, it generally looks quite cool), and I’m mostly worried we’ll end up with that anyways. What I really want, then, is to see this fever break (let Rain shine, continue with the thematic stuff, etc.) so we can all come through Dark Honor with the glow of a truly healthy story.
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