Trust isn’t what it used to be.
Creative Staff:
Story: Stephanie Phillips
Art: Evgeniy Bornyakov
Colors: Lauren Affe
Letterer: Troy Peteri
What They Say:
Our heroes race to stop the cult from abducting another child, David and Amanda rehash some ugly truths from their past and Jo learns a dark secret about her FBI partner. Can the team learn to work together to stop more children from disappearing? Can David be trusted to babysit a child? Probably not.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Descendent moves along well here as we get a lot of familiar material and some tweaks that step things up a bit in terms of the big picture. Stephanie Phillips has a lot of good character material here that flows well and has some nice natural touches to it that makes it all the more engaging. And Evgeniy Bornyakov does a great job of bringing it to life with some spot-on expressions. This is a pretty dialogue-heavy issue and that’s not easy to make work sometimes but Bornyakov keeps it moving along pretty good in this area. The bigger scenes are just a couple of pages total but they definitely add some color to the property.
The way things have shaken out so far now has David and Jo at Amanda’s as they’ve gone to ground for a bit after all that they’ve learned and with Jo coming on board with it. The back and forth over it as they figure out that the name in the book with Sarah is actually Gedney’s kid certainly raises the stakes a bit and it’s surprising to see Jo letting her partner Michael know so he can go and get her. A lot of what we get in the early part focuses on Jo learning that David and Amanda were married and that runs to a range of jokes and uncomfortable moments at different times. But what it does is change up the dynamic a good bit, making for some interesting dialogue between everyone as the book progresses.
With the trio staking out the Gedney house, we see how things within the organization have been going on as Michael is being given one more chance to find the lost book while he tries to parlay finding out about Sarah and her whereabouts as his way of making amends. It’s not going well for him there and we see just how badly it goes when he does try to get Sarah since Jo and the others are there. Jo’s shock is pretty nicely handled and it definitely makes it clear that she’s not going to be trusting anyone at this point. Amusingly, while they have saved Sarah they didn’t think through what to do to try and help her and with nobody around, she’s now part of the group. More amusing is that it essentially gives David someone his own mental age to hang with as he’s feeling more and more out of the picture with Jo and Amanda running the show.
In Summary:
Descendent continues to be a book that feels like you need to really read it in trade for with the kind of decompressed approach that it’s taking. We get some decent nuggets here and it nudges relationship dynamics forward and the general idea of things but there’s nothing that feels significant. But if you read the three issues prior at the same time, you can definitely get a better flow and energy from it. Phillips did a really good job with the dynamic between the main three here and I really like how Bonyakov handles the expressions on the characters as we go through the laughter and teasing. It’s an interesting book with its ideas and characters but it hasn’t hit that compelling part yet for each issue.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comix
Release Date: August 7th, 2019
MSRP: $3.99
