Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct #1 & 2 Review

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Reviewer: Jimmy Lin
Story Title: n/a

Written by: Paul Di Filippo
Art by: Jerry Ordway
Colored by: Jeromy Cox
Lettered by: Todd Klein
Editor: Scott Dunbier
Publisher: America’s Best Comics

I’m going to expound first, and then I’m going to review these books. There won’t be a whole lotta review, but that’s okay, because there wasn’t a whole lot to review.

It’s hard to write superhero teams beyond a certain parameters, usually team size and arc length. When Warren Ellis took over StormWatch, he solved the first problem by first eliminating several characters and then grouping the remaining ones into small, manageable teams. By making one small team the focus of each narrative, he was able to write short arcs that were both plot- and character-driven. It’s a great approach that’s been used before – most of the great and lasting superhero teams have pretty small rosters (the JSA being the exception).

Take James Robinson’s The Golden Age for example. In his de-re-construction of DC’s post-WWII continuity, Robinson had probably 100 potential characters to work with. He could have written a 1000-page epic that included all of them, but instead, by using Johnny Quick, Manhunter, The Ultra-Humanite, and “Dynaman” to drive the plot (with assists from Hawkman, Green Latern, Starman, and Libby), Robinson pounded out an edge-of-your-seat thriller that did still gave you a real and substantial sense of each main character. Kingdom Come is another example of multiple-hero story that uses this technique to great effect.

Unfortunately, Paul Di Filippo doesn’t seem to have learned this lesson yet. After two issues of Top Ten: Beyond the Farthest Precinct, I have the barest sense of a story and no sense of any of the characters. This is what I can tell you – while Top Ten is having a barbeque, a large and horrifying apparition appears and scares the shit out of everyone before disappearing five seconds later. The next day, the teams at Top 10 are reorganized into pairs. The chief is fired and replaced with a more “aggressive” character, and the various pairings do some investigating, making zero headway before the apparition appears again. The new chief puts everyone’s nose to the grindstone, and the issue ends with a clumsy parallel to the Patriot Act (oooh, you’re making such a political statement, aren’t you). I can’t tell you anything about any of the characters, other than the hot mermaid seems to be paired up with a hot lesbian and that the new chief is a ham-handed metaphor for the Bush administration. Filippo makes the tacit error that a lot of superteam authors make – too many parallel stories with too many damned characters. I can respect that he’s trying to give everyone equal panel time, but these are comic characters, not actors. By diffusing one story over what seems like 20 characters and at least 5 discernable subplots, everything is lost.

Now, while Filippo gets lost in his story, Jerry Ordway does an admirable job of plowing through the miasma and coming out clean. With such a large number of characters, it’s remarkable that he can work with so many designs and keep each one distinct. Great sense of action and panel-to-panel storytelling – Jerry Ordway gets three thumbs up.