Becstar #4

Becstar #4

Mad Cave Studios 2021

Written by Joe Corallo

Illustrated by Lorenzo Colangeli

Coloured by Sweeney Boo

Lettered by Joamette Gil

It's a race to the creation gauntlet in the penultimate issue of Becstar! With Sally #2 on board, Becstar and crew are on their way to Anyssa... but so is Mordecai and the Shadow Syndicate. Who will get their first and what will happen when they do?

It shouldn’t surprise me but it does just how excited I got when I sat down to read this issue. Granted I’m not a fan of this style of artwork, however, it certainly doesn’t detract from the story or the story’s enjoyment. It is all about personal preference because the work is nicely done and I never want anyone to think they’ve not got the talent. So with the race for the gauntlet of creation in full swing it is the final piece of the puzzle of artefacts that the group found all that time ago. This journey that we’ve seen Becstar undertake has been pretty seriously detailed and how her reticence to open up has been broken down through all this has made such a great impact on me as a reader.

I am very much enjoying the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented exceedingly well. The character development that we see through the dialogue, the character interaction and how they act and react to the situations and circumstances which they encounter. This of course highlights their personalities and how we’ve seen them grow and change over the course of the series. The pacing is excellent and as it takes us through the pages the action builds like a crescendo.

How we see this being structured and how the layers within the story continue to emerge, grow, evolve and strengthen. There are those that are self contained and those that have yet to be explored and then there’s the whole two Paprika’s business which we don’t know anything about. What all these do is add depth, dimension and complexity to the story so it feels much fuller and more than meets the eye in greater scope of things. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as how it moves the story forward is exceedingly well achieved.

The interiors here are well rendered. It’s not my style of choice but it’s cleanly rendered and the expressions on the faces bring us great emotion and feeling from the characters. I would like to see more attention to detail throughout the book especially when it comes to the way we see backgrounds. Still how we see the composition within the panels bringing out the depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the story is well done. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a talented eye for storytelling. The various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work is really nice to see here.

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This is a great little book and as we’ve watched it grow and evolve from the first page of the first issue we’ve had such an amazing journey. It is still up in the air if the girls are going to be able to stop Mordecai or not but according to my magic 8-ball it says “Better not tell you now” so I guess we’ll have to come back next month and find out for sure. With some incredible writing and sharp witty characterisation along with interiors that suit the book it is great to see how good this book is.