Campisi: The Dragon Incident #3

Campisi: The Dragon Incident #3

Aftershock Comics 2021

Written by James Patrick

Illustrated by Marco Locati

Lettered by Rachel Deering

Sonny Campisi is learning that dragons are a pain in the keister. You can't fool them, you can't bribe them, and you can't kick their teeth in. On top of that, he has to stop some of the neighbourhood idiots from trying to take care of the problem themselves with their beer muscles. And then Sonny's mob boss, Mr. Rossi, is growing very impatient with this dragon situation and is about to make a very poor decision. And if Sonny can't manage every single problem, the neighbourhood he grew up in will be burned to the ground.

I’m totally digging this series. Sonny is a fixer and he’s good at what he does but the inherent problem here is he’s surrounded by men who think they are more powerful, more deserving and generally just arseholes to the tenth degree. His boss, the neighbouring boss and everyone else who doesn’t understand the gravity of their situation is thinking they know how to handle things and they don’t, no one does the research and it becomes a pissing contest or a whip it out and measure it contest and all this does is show how inadequate they really are. This dragon is reality check folks and only the person willing to do the actual work to figure out how to resolve this well that’s who they need.

I’m 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 narration, the dialogue, the character interaction as well as how we see them act and react to the situations and circumstances which they encounter does wonders in continuing to flesh out the personalities. The pacing is excellent and as it takes us through the pages revealing more of the story the more we find ourselves enamoured, flustered and frustrated by what we see.

I like how we see this being structured and how the layers within the story continue to emerge, grow, evolve and strengthen. Thanks to the layers we see new avenues open up and these add so much depth, dimension and complexity to the story. How we see everything working together to create the story as well as how it moves the story forward are immaculately rendered.

I’m enjoying the interiors here. The linework itself comes across as soft and delicate but the strength and power it conveys is enormous. We see some nice use of backgrounds, though we could see more, and they enhance and expand the moments nicely as well as work within the composition of the panels to bring out the depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope of this story. The creativity and imagination that we see throughout is brought to life extremely well, I mean dragons and a cyclops alongside the burrough and the mob types yeah this takes some great imagination. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels shows a remarkable eye for storytelling. The various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work show an amazing eye for how colour works.

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Sonny is the guy everyone knows and likes in the neighbourhood. He’s genuine, grew up there and honestly cares about those who live there and he’ll do whatever he can to keep them safe. The problem is he’s young, full of ideas and not a hard man so he tends to get pushed around by those he works for. He’s the epitome of the small town hero, yes the burrough of New York of any major city for that matter can be seen as a small town. With some spectacular writing and perfect characterisation alongside these notable interiors we really see his world brought to life.