“Would someone please explain the reason for this strange behavior”
Jordan Thomas (writer), Daniel Gete (artist), Jason Wordie and Jão Canola (colorists), Jeff Powell (letterer), and Karl Bollers (editor), bring us the second volume of Skin Police, which is from Oni Press, costs $19.99, and it’s 88 pages long.
I enjoyed the first part of Skin Police, enough to get the second, although it’s not terribly original. 
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been avoiding reviewing some of the trades I’ve gotten, simply because there’s not a lot to say about them — I’ve never been one to just go over the plot, and if I ever find myself doing only that with regard to a comic, it probably means I shouldn’t write about it. With this series, however, I have some thoughts, so I’d like to share them. Aren’t you glad you read the blog?!?!?
As we saw in volume 1, this is set a little over 100 years in the future, and cloning is rampant and extremely illegal, partly because of course it is and partly because the clones are unstable, and when they “pop,” they go on violent rampages. Brisson Eckis is a member of the arm of the police tasked with hunting down the clones, and at the end of volume 1, he discovered something about them that made him reconsider everything, which we knew he would. Every piece of fiction in the world that has been created over the past, say, 40 years that has a cop as the main character has them discovering something that makes them reconsider everything they’ve ever known, so this isn’t new. In this volume, Eckis has to deal with the ramifications of what he’s learned, all while still trying to stop the “dupes” from wreaking havoc. It’s Plotline 101, in other words, and Thomas doesn’t do anything too surprising with it. I suppose there’s an interesting moment near the end when Eckis has to make a tough decision, but other than that, this unfolds pretty much as you’d expect.
Meanwhile, Gete is just a solid artist — he doesn’t do too much with bells and whistles, just tells the story how it ought to be told. His thin line works well in a futuristic setting, and his architecture is quite nice. 
His hatching helps add some toughness to Eckis and the other characters and some nice roughness to the dazzling future, which, of course, isn’t as nice as everyone pretends. There’s a really nice double-page spread near the end where the “dupes” are going wild that combines Gete’s attention to architectural detail, his nice use of spot blacks, and his precise way of drawing people, and it’s breath-taking. I’m not sure how much comics work Gete does on Spanish books and opposed to those published here in the States, but he’s a good artist for this kind of book — he probably wouldn’t be great at superheroes, because his art just doesn’t seem like a good fit, but he does body horror pretty well.
So why am I writing about this? Well, it gets back to comics publishing and what publishers expect from their comics. This comic, which ran 8 issues, feels rushed and incomplete. Eckis is still alive at the end (SPOILER!), and he’s still in the Skin Police, despite everything he’s learned about the “dupe” situation. It feels obvious that Thomas had more on his mind about this plot, but I suppose the comic didn’t sell enough to warrant it. That sucks for Thomas and Gete, sure, but what my question is: What is the threshold? Oni is not a big publisher, and I can’t imagine anything they publish is going to sell very well unless it’s done by Jhonen Vasquez, so what’s the floor here? Oni couldn’t commit to a 12-issue story and tell Thomas, “We’re going to do 12 issues, so make sure you have an entire story to tell in those issues and we promise not to cancel this before that”? I don’t know, but I get that sales drive publishing, but, come on, it’s Oni — the floor can’t be that high. I’m just wondering why Thomas didn’t see this coming after the first arc, and why he didn’t talk to Oni about it. There was a gap between the first arc and the second arc, so why didn’t they discuss it? 
I don’t know — it’s frustrating, because it’s clear Thomas has a bit more on his mind with this, unless he really did want to leave it open-ended. Maybe that’s true? If so, that’s also kind of annoying. Eckis is kind of still in the spot where he began, except he implies big things are still coming. Well? Don’t we get to see the big things? I guess not. (And yes, I’m aware that based on my assertion that this isn’t the greatest comic ever, this complaint sounds like the person dumping on the restaurant food while also being annoyed that the portions were too small, but I still aver that it’s entertaining, just not brilliant.)
Anyway, maybe we will get another arc in a bit. This feels like an ending, but maybe it will sell decently and Oni will say, “Hey, Jordan, do you have another arc in you?” Beats me. It just seems that comics publishing is very weird, and I don’t understand it (I know, I know — the list of things I don’t understand is long and varied), and I get annoyed by stories like this, which feel like it could be longer and wouldn’t be too big a deal if they did lengthen it. What are the margins here? I guess they’re thinner than I thought!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
