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Andy Diggle / Shawn Martinbrough, The Losers: Downtime

The Losers is an ongoing monthly comic about a Special Forces-type squad who've been betrayed and left for dead. Now they want revenge, and justice. In the first six issues they pulled off a rather tricky operation to retrieve a hard drive containing Important Data, the exact nature of which escapes me at this moment. "Downtime" is a two-issue story devoted to making the Losers a bit more human and interesting. The second of these works; the first, not as much.

Jensen the hacker gets the short end of the stick; about five pages out of the forty-eight, and two of those are devoted to a power-outage gag. Clay the leader has a lot of page time, but doesn't get much development, either. His scenes are mostly there to fill in some background on the Losers and what exactly it was that went wrong. Cougar the sniper remains an enigma, but between his nightmare and the Day of the Dead he's an intriguing one. Aisha the ass-kicking Arabic (?) chick amuses herself by looking in on some old friends from the first issue and then taking out a slave trader. Again not so much with actual development, but lots of good hooks. And Pooch. . . Pooch the driver gets more character than a stick can be shaken at. A wife and two kids, and a brother-in-law who doesn't trust him. He handles himself well. (His wife feels flat; I'm not sure I believe in her completely. Oh well.)

It's a good series despite Diggle's really bloody irritating habit of ending every issue on a cliffhanger. The art is non-bad as well. I'm happy, and curious to see where the story goes from here. And ultimately, that's all I can ask for.

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"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

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