Author: Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!
21 Down Volume 7 by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray
This volume begins with Preston telling his dead brother Rob's partner exactly what went down when Rob died. He also has a brief and inexplicable flashback - the flashback itself makes no sense. It's purported purpose is to show how Preston got to be Rob's bitch. Like I said, it makes no sense.
Preston wakes up to find he's in a hotel room with Mickey, and he's pissed at her because now he can't go home - his apartment is evidently under surveillance because of her tangle with Agents Ishikawa and Sizemore. He walks out on Mickey and contacts his old friend Clyde from the tattoo parlor. Clyde arranges for him to visit his brother's corpse.
In touching his brother's skin, Preston finds himself not seeing events that led up to his death, but events immediately after it, in which Rob literally strolls off into the sunset and meets their dead parents. because that's everyone's ambition when they die - to go back and live with their parents! This was way too cheesy for me. And there's no precedent for it. Maybe he only sees the future event when he's personally witnessed the past one?
In an idea right out of John Cafferty's Just a Matter of Time (which he no doubt purloined from elsewhere), "...you take just one small grain of sand right into the palm of your hand...." Preston takes a bright sparkle from Rob's outstretched spiritual hand and suddenly he's a new man - one with a purpose. No, not a porpoise! That would be silly. A purpose. Yeah, he's now got the trite stuff!
Almost forty percent of this comic was advertising. This is another reason I don't like comics that much. Graphic novels tend to have a lot less space devoted to advertising. That said, I liked the story. It seemed like not much was happening in this volume, like the writer was drawing his breath, and as I understand it, this one marked the finale of the first 'season', but there was plenty of food for thought.
Why comics would have seasons or anything like seasons is a complete mystery to me, but this one left us with an interesting ending - not so much a cliff-hanger as a teaser for the next sequence. At this point I am still on-board with the series.
