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Vertigo Quarterly: Magenta #1 – Review

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By: Too many to list—or even to review. Just check out the issue.

The Story: You’ll be tickled pink by what you read.

The Review: I enjoyed the last quarterly just fine, but I couldn’t help being a little dismayed by the $7.99 price point. That’s a lot of money for a bunch of shorts, not all of which are gems. On the flipside, none of them sucked or anything, and for what is basically a collection of pieces by mostly unknown writers and artists, that’s pretty remarkable. You might say that what you’re really paying for is the dreams of some talented creators, for whom this might be an opening to a big break.

That just leaves the puzzle of the color themes for each quarterly. Cyan produced such a jumble of different pieces that it didn’t really seem to be much of a unifying theme at all. Magenta looks to be a very different story. There’s still plenty of variety in the stories generated in this issue, but certain patterns emerge, ones that just might have something to do with our psychological perception of magenta itself.

Rian Hughes’ “Magenta Is Not a Color” serves as a near-thesis on the color: “Magenta is only perceived in the eye and the brain, as mix of red and blue light—which are placed from each other at opposite ends of the spectrum… Magenta only exists in the mind.” And actually, most of the stories in this issue fall into two camps: magenta as radicalism and magenta as neurosis.

Hughes’ own feature falls into the first camp, revolving around a girl who nearly bathes in magenta to express her non-conformity, until she realizes non-conformity can be a kind of conformity, rendering magenta useless as symbolism. That’s not the case in Carla Berrocal’s “Who Is Uber?” Where gray and yellow are the colors of conventional society, magenta marks the fringe elements; Uber’s switch in alliance is expressed by a change in hairdo, from the perfectly coiffed blond to an asymmetrical magenta.

By and large, however, magenta is used to show that not all is right in the characters’ heads. Young Zoe in Jody Houser’s “Adrift” sees her sister’s Barbara Jane doll in pure magenta just as the doll comes to life to guide Zoe on a Socratic journey to cope with her grandma’s death. When Benedict Plantagenet Fitzhubris in Peter Milligan’s “The Shoe in the Attic” picks up a magenta high-heeled shoe, it’s a prelude to the violent mental break to follow. The disturbed Ed in Michael Moreci’s “Captives” sees his medication as tiny magenta pills, and as the feature concludes, magenta radiates from his head, just as his brother starts hearing the same noises he initially heard alone.

And then there are the stories in which magenta not only doesn’t fall into either category, but hardly features in an important way at all. Rachel Deering’s “Bone White, Blood Red” uses magenta simply for its malevolent character, lighting the way for demons to invade Kristine’s life. Ryan K. Lindsay uses magenta to highlight the eponymous “Gloves” which serve as both motivation and plot device in his piece. And magenta is simply the underlying décor for a rocking nightclub the protagonist of Fabio Moon’s “Pink Slumber” visits when he can’t sleep. These stories don’t suffer for magenta’s limited use, but neither did they need the color for any purpose.

Art-wise, pretty much every collaborator displays a lot of promise, though some are more fit to the comic book medium than others. Berrocal and Hughes’ highly stylized art is more appropriate for graphic design than storytelling; they can do the job if the features are short, but they’ll be hard to take if the story goes on any longer. Some of the artists can handle the storytelling just fine, but their cartoony look will inevitably limit the kinds of stories they can tell; Rufus Dayglo almost turns “The Shoe in the Attic” into a farce with his caricaturized faces, as does Nathan Fox with “Adrift.” Only Moon manages to inject enough sophistication into his lanky, exaggerated figures to be taken seriously. The other artists all have workable indie styles, with the exception of Dawson Walker, who provides the art in “Gem Pockets.” His rough, shaky sketchwork is the kind of thing you’d expect from a talented high-schooler doodling on the back of his homework, not a finished product in a Vertigo quarterly.

Conclusion: For one-shot shorts from mostly unfamiliar names, it’s a worthwhile read, and certainly they’re different offerings from the other publishers’.

Grade: B

- Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – Suzy in “Gem Pockets” declares, “Hans Christian Anderson is all about queer trauma, and nobody talks about this.” Is he really? Am I missing something?


Filed under: DC Comics, Reviews, Vertigo Tagged: Carla Berrocal, Dawson Walker, DC, DC Comics, Fabio Moon, Jody Houser, Michael Moreci, Nathan Fox, Peter Milligan, Rachel Deering, Rian Hughes, Rufus Dayglo, Ryan K. Lindsay, Vertigo, Vertigo Comics, Vertigo Quarterly, Vertigo Quarterly: Magenta, Vertigo Quarterly: Magenta #1, Vertigo Quarterly: Magenta #1 review

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