Bad Luck Fighting Style.
Creative Staff:
Story: Lela Gwenn
Art: Matthew Dow Smith
Colors: Kelly Fitzpatrick
Letterer: Frank Cvetkovic
What They Say:
Cursed at birth, Charlene ”Chuck” Manchester hires out her own bad luck, providing disaster where someone else can profit—but now disaster is coming home to roost! The cops want her, the evangelists want her, and a highly motivated insurance adjuster wants her—Chuck ran to the one place she’s ever been safe, and now she’s brought a hellish alliance down on her sanctuary, led by a vengeful mob boss.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Bad Luck Chuck draws to a close with this issue and it’s one that’s moving at a mile a minute and feels just as rushed. I really liked what Lela Gween did over the first couple of installments as we got to know Chuck a bit and as the story expanded as it had some really neat little quirks to it. It’s also a book that functioned really well with Matthew Dow Smith’s artwork as the designs just felt very right for it. I’ve felt he’s ended up on some poorly paired books before but this was just right and delivered a very good looking run that especially conveyed the action just right.
The finale, sadly, falls short of what has come before it. The general idea here at this point is that as events have unfolded, it’s all coming down to the temple as Fayola has been captured initially while her mother ends up being freed and is ready to rumble at said temple. The temple as a focus isn’t exactly out of the left field but the book opens with a few pages of Chinese proverb style material and the middle section features Fayola’s mother’s forces going up against the monks, making for some good hand to hand action until someone gets shot. I do like that just before that we get Chuck getting her hands dirty and fighting herself because her bad luck causes a lot of things to go badly. It’s goofy and silly when it does work and that felt just about right, even if the whole thing ends badly with a monk getting shot.
From there, it just turns into kind of a mess that involves the core group being arrested, breaking out of prison when a sinkhole swallows a part of it, and then it starts riffing almost exactly on the A-Team setup thing, right down to a van as they head off into the world doing good. It’s such a strange shift from where the book started that it’s like a completely different series. You do want your characters to change and grow some over a storyline but it also needs to feel like it’s a natural bit of growth because of the story and events. Here, the book just goes all in on the action as a finale and shifts into becoming generic 80s action episodic concept material.
In Summary:
I really liked this book when it started and it had some neat ideas in the middle that didn’t flow as well as they could as we lost sight of Chuck a bit more and Fayola and her family weren’t as cleanly introduced as they could be. I do like the action here as Matthew Dow Smith executes it well, but the story just falls apart quickly and there’s not much to really connect with, especially with how it all unfolds at the end and shifts into an A-Team knockoff.
Grade: C+
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: June 26th, 2019
MSRP: $3.99
