Marjorie Finnegan Temporal Criminal #2

Marjorie Finnegan Temporal Criminal #2

AWA Upshot Studios 2021

Written by Garth Ennis

Illustrated by Goran SudŽuka

Coloured by Miroslav MRVA

Lettered by Rob Steen

She's Marjorie Finnegan. She's a temporal criminal. What more do you need to know?

Oh, all right then: all Marj wants to do is race up and down the time-lanes, stealing every shiny-gleamy-pretty-sparkly she can lay her hands on. But her larcenous trail from the Big Bang to the Ninety-fifth Reich has drawn the beady eye of the Temporal PD, whose number one Deputy Marshall is now hard on our heroine's tail-- and taking things extremely personally. Worse still, Marj's worthless creep of an ex and his even scummier partner have seen an angle of their own in all this, and now intend to use her time-tech to change history for their own benefit. Marj's only ally? A guy called Tim. And he's just a head.

I mean come on, what use is just a head...?

Well now this is already one of those issues where things happen and they happen kind of fast and furious, furious as in her sister’s anger towards her. With her sister and her ex all having their own agendas playing out simultaneously is some impressive writing from Garth.

I am loving the way that this is being told. The story & plot development we see through how the sequence of events unfold and how the reader learns information is presented exceptionally well. The character development is phenomenal as we see the dialogue, character interaction as well as how they act and react to the situations and circumstances they encounter. This fleshes them out as real people. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing more and more of the story we find ourselves riveted to the page.

I like how we see this being structured and how the layers within the story continue to grow, evolve and new ones emerge. It is within these layers that the characterisation is at its highest and the good bits that give us the past and new ideas for what the future holds that work with the main arc and strengthen it while still remaining separate entities. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as how it manages to move the story forward is wonderfully achieved.

The interiors here are extremely charming. The linework is strong, clean and crisp and how the varying weights and techniques are being utilised to create the detail work that we see is astonishingly well rendered. Backgrounds here aren’t that big of a deal as it’s in this outside of time kind of place and it’s just Marj’s home that we see with a lot swirling pinks and yellows. Still we do manage to get some excellent depth perception, sense of scale and that overall sense of size and scope to the story. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show an extremely talented eye for storytelling. The colour work is gorgeous as well. How we see the various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work is sensational to see. Aside from the yellow and pinks the glow they cast on Marj and her sister is rendered exceptionally well.

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How can two sisters be such polar opposites of each other? It isn’t as odd as one thinks but Marj has some serious morality issues, as in she doesn’t seem to have any, and from what we’ve seen she brought joy in terrorising her sister when they were kids hence the whole desire to arrest her and bring her to justice. The whole Chrissy Snow dumb blonde act is actually incredibly endearing even when she doesn’t see what’s wrong with anything she’s done. This is so smartly written and the humour and creativity is outrageously good and with the interiors as strong as they are they work beautifully together.