“Can’t go off-script now!”
Creative Staff:
Story: Patrick Kindlon
Art: Marco Ferrari
Colors: Patrizia Comino
Letterer: Jim Campbell
What They Say:
Old friends better run, because Operation PATIENCE! CONVICTION! REVENGE! is underway. Everything goes wrong at once. The plan is falling apart. Renny’s nemesis has anticipated his every move. Any sane person would admit it’s over. But Renny didn’t spend years in the desert building murderbots to settle for “sane.”
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This series has done its best to be pretty intense and on the move since the beginning and that made a huge impression with its debut. It’s hard to keep up that kind of intensity and craziness for too long though and Patrick Kindlon took us through a few swerves along the way that slowed it down almost too much. Renny’s revenge wasn’t quite as clear to the reader as it should have been and it made the sidebars less distinct. It did help, however, that Marco Ferrari really delivered some great work throughout as it captured this sense of craziness in a huge way that really made it exciting to read even when the story itself fell into a bit of a lull. The combination of this team together really nailed it though.
With this issue, we get the finale for this arc and that sets us up for a lot more fun in the traditional sense. Though I’ll admit that I don’t think it needs to showcase more of Renny’s quest for revenge because we know most of what we need to through this arc. Renny’s taken quite the beating recently while we’ve seen Robot Paul continue his infiltration into the mobster side of things. For Renny, he’s now intent on moving everything up faster since things are a lot more public now even as Marisol keeps telling him its time to rethink the plan some. But Renny’s the type that’s singularly focused and he’s planned so far ahead, supposedly, that deviating in the here and now really doesn’t make sense since so much more has been doing. So pushing the big event to the next night is a huge advancement in the timeline in the eyes of some.
It’s a lot of fun watching him get everyone on his team ready, doing some of the repair work and just looking haggard himself, while Robot Paul does repair work in the building while following through on plans there. So, when we get the big play as the attack on the building gets underway the next day, it goes truly big and crazy. Renny’s being captured by Welsh likely wasn’t a part of his plan but he’s lined things up so far in advance that when the building falls and takes out Welsh, it’s a kind of empty bit of revenge, at least to me. For Renny, this is the start of a long run of deaths ahead of him so it didn’t need to be a hugely cathartic event. It just needed to happen. I can only imagine how the rest of his robot friends must feel knowing that they’ve got so much more ahead of them.
In Summary:
Patience! Conviction! Revenge! had a lot of great moments throughout its run. It has a crazy kind of intensity that I loved and it took its time in a number of areas to truly reveal itself. Kindlon made it wordier than some other series of a similar nature would do but that worked well with how Renny operates and the larger scale of events playing out here. Marc Ferrari over-delivered in the artwork department as this is just a fantastic looking book through and through with the characters, the settings, and the general backgrounds and world designed. I loved this run a lot as a whole and definitely hope people discover its crazy in trade form down the line.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: January 9th, 2019
MSRP: $3.99
