REVIEW: Human Target #4 Is Good But Could Be Better

Ice and Christopher Chance sitting together on a tight seat

I know why you’re here. “Cori’s reviewing a Tom King book? Let’s get popcorn!” And sorry to disappoint, but I’m not going to tear this book apart as much as I do most of King’s work. The Human Target is the best series he’s written in years, probably since the launch of Mister Miracle. I don’t know if it’s going to stick the landing, but as of now, it’s the most enjoyable King work I’ve read in a long time.

The Human Target #4

Clayton Cowles (letters), Tom King (writer), Greg Smallwood (art and cover),
DC Comics
January 25, 2021

This review contains spoilers for The Human Target #1-4.

Blue Beetle fighting some men while Christopher Chance drinks from a flask, on a bright yellow background filled with sound effects

I want to start with the many things that are absolutely fantastic about the book. Most importantly, Greg Smallwood’s art is undeniably gorgeous on every page. The characters all look distinct and each of them has an incredible personality just in the art alone. Christopher Chance is old and tired, a little rough around the edges – something sold by the bags under his eyes. This is fitting because not only is he a grizzled veteran of mercenary work, but in the first issue, he was poisoned with a slow-acting poison, giving him 12 days to live. The other lead of the book is Ice, and honestly, the character has never been more beautiful than in Smallwood’s art. There is an incredible softness to her that drives home her “girl next door” features, but when Smallwood draws her in action, he captures an underlying strength.Human Target 4 Page One Christopher Chance and Ice talking to Ted Kord
Also incredible is Smallwood’s colorwork. He’s coloring himself in this series, and the colors help to make the art sing. He’s making extensive use of color holds and working to frame everything in a vintage, pulpy feel. The color holds are most notable when looking at Ice’s hair, but they’re used throughout the series, and it gives the comic a feeling as if rendered immaculately in colored pencils.
Human Target 4 page 3 - Ted Kord leading Tora and Christopher out of his office
The color holds also play into Clayton Cowles lettering for the book. The word balloons and narrative caption boxes lack borders and it works with the art style presented by Smallwood. Cowles also has been flexing with sound effects and titles in the series, as shown on the vibrant cover and the title page of issue #4. It’s wonderful lettering work and helps to drive the story forward in a fun way.
Ted Kord leading Christopher and Tora to his flying bug while getting undressedNow the reason you’re all reading this: the writing. I’ve gone pretty hard on King in the past, and with good reason. He has a habit of shoehorning characters into stories that are not the best fit for them, drastically ignoring or altering their characterizations to fit the plot of his books. He loves to write mysteries but doesn’t play fair when doing so, intentionally hiding information from the readers so that they can’t have the satisfaction of solving the mystery themselves. He uses trauma in a way that, while therapeutic for him, can come off as sensationalized and exploitative to a general audience.

But like I said in the introduction, this is probably the best book by him that I’ve read in the past four years. Part of that is due to some of his bad habits being tamped down, while another part is that I’m not as strongly connected to the characters he’s using as I have been to some in the past. I was never a huge Justice League International fan, and I think these are the first Human Target comics I’ve ever read. There’s not a great deal of trauma exploitation in this series, and the trauma that is looked at is done in a less focused way than some of his past series. It’s still a mystery, and since we’re just finishing the first act, I’m sure he’s hiding something from the reader, but I’m not sure exactly what yet, and maybe he’ll surprise me by being more straightforward with his audience than he has been in the past. The clues thus far certainly seem that way, at least.
Ted Kord putting on his Blue Beetle costume while leading Christopher and Tora to the BugKing’s story is compelling, and both the art and lettering sing, so why do I say this could be better? Well, that goes back to that first complaint I had about his work and shoving characters into story roles while ignoring their personalities and character development. King likes characters to play archetypes, and if that character isn’t traditionally in that role, he’ll bend them to make them fit. With characters like Christopher Chance, that works perfectly fine. Chance doesn’t have a ton of comic history to pull from, and before this series, he hadn’t had a mainline DC Comics series appearance since 1989. He’d had a TV tie-in comic in 1991 and another (for another TV series) in 2010 and had a long Vertigo series in the early 2000s, but mostly Chance is a blank slate, and that works for Tom King.
Ted, Tora, and Christopher getting on the Bug and getting situatedWhat doesn’t work as well for King is the rest of the book’s cast. Most notably I’ll point to Ice and Guy Gardner. Ice is presented visually like the innocent girl next door, but she is here primarily to fill the role of femme fatale. This is a noir mystery, and that position had to be filled by someone. Never mind that that role is better suited for Ice’s counterpart Fire — King needed Bea to be one of the primary suspects instead.

The Bug taking off from Kord Industries, with a title text of "To this great stage of fools!"
But Ice isn’t the biggest place where this is evident; instead, that would be with the appearance of Guy Gardner in issue #3. Guy has been presented as the hot-headed, somewhat abusive ex-boyfriend of the femme fatale. King completely ignores 30 years of character development and relationships to present the Guy Gardner and Ice relationship exactly like it was in the early 1990s. Guy comes off as mean, possessive, and jealous, while in other comics with Ice, he respects her boundaries and grows as a character.

So how could Human Target be better? The one easy way to make this series a lot better would be to divorce it from the DC Universe. These do not need to be DC characters, and the story would work immensely better if they weren’t. And really, James Tynion has proven that you can work in Black Label outside of the DC Universe with a compelling story with The Nice House on the Lake. If this was a series with original characters playing these archetypal roles? This book would be an A-grade book every month. As it is, it’s still been consistent in my rankings with a B for all four issues, but I can see how it would be a lot better with just that one little tweak.

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Cori McCreery

Cori McCreery

Cori is a life long comic nerd residing in Northern California. A life long Supergirl and DC Comics fan, she is the DC Comics Beat Reporter for Women Write About Comics.

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