Digging into the past.
Creative Staff:
Story: Cavan Scott
Art: Corin Howell
Colors: Triona Farell
Letterer: Andworld Design
What They Say:
The much-anticipated next arc of Shadow Service begins! Betrayed by one of their own, MI666 takes to the dangerous streets of Rome. But can the traitor be brought back into the fold? The chase is on. Plus, Aashi’s secret past is finally revealed.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With a few months between issues, Shadow Service starts a new arc with this installment and it’s pretty easy to get back into the swing of things. Cavan Scott has a fun and fertile ground to play with here, one that hasn’t set a lot of its rules yet, and has characters to explore which is the focus here. Corin Howell definitely was a shining light in the run to date and getting more artwork from her here is definitely welcome. With its focus on Aashi, we get something that’s grim and dark and in its own way pretty soulless, but there’s still some good humanity that comes through with the artwork and Triona Farell’s heavy color design that’s pretty appropriate for the book overall.
With Gina on the run and doing her own thing after escaping from Hex previously, this issue focuses on almost anything but her. We do get her as the focus of a chase sequence in the back half of the book but she’s barely got anything to say and no real plot points revealed there about what’s going on and what she and Quill are up to. Instead, the book focuses largely on Aashi right from the get go. She makes it clear that she has no real sense of anything and is just a body that moves and does without feeling, but it’s made even heavier in feel this time around. The opening bit with her doing a kind of base-jump piece in order to feel some adrenaline doesn’t go anywhere and even Hex is annoyed by it since he has to get her out of jail since she pushed back on the cops attempting to arrest her, again just so that she could feel something.
What gets things moving again in regards to finding Gina is that with Edwin in their hands, Hex has now found the tool needed to motivate him to tell them where Gina’s likely at, and to use him to track her. That brings them to Rome and we get some decent chase material and some supernatural elements to it, but the book focuses on Aashi’s “origin” from three years prior when she was in the military in Afghanistan. It’s here that thing went wrong on a patrol with her group that blew up their transport and put them into a nasty firefight, one where she was the only survivor at the end. And one where something was done that was experimental to save her and the burns that covered her body. The result is what we have now in that she doesn’t feel and recovers quickly, but spread out over half the issue it’s a slow burn background origin story that doesn’t add too much yet since it’s light on the procedure itself and who all is behind it.
In Summary:
I really enjoyed the first five issues of Shadow Service and the weirdness that it played with so coming back for more was a given. This installment is a bit more grounded overall with its focus on Aashi but it employs enough of the magical side to it that there’s enough to enjoy there. Cavan Scott’s script is solid and gives us an inside look at Aashi pretty well while Corin Howell’s artwork continues to be a delight no matter what she’s illustrating. I suspect we’ll get more with Gina the next time around but even a storyline that’s more focused on Hex and his side of things isn’t a bad thing to dig into.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Vault Comics
Release Date: March 31st, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
