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Review: Sisters of Sorrow #2

By Dustin Cabeal

After my last tongue lashing for this series, I bet you’re wondering why I’m back again? Well, I do like to give things more than one chance because you never know when something could surprise you. That didn’t happen here in case you were wondering. No, unfortunately, it’s just more of the same. Passed on TV scripts being poorly transposed into comic books.

Thankfully they explain why they dress as nuns. It’s nothing deep, though the dialogue tries to make it deeper. It’s as simple as one of the women stealing them from a church that had them locked in a cabinet. Yeah, she just steals them from a church. I guess they had to be authentic or something.

The story continues to be a goddamn mess. There’s a huge time jump from the last issue in which the wife of the cop pulls the trigger and walks away. In this issue, she’s arrested already. The other women panic and assume she’ll confess to the murder. There is nothing in the story to give the reader this feeling, nor has the relationships between the women been built enough to get this impression, nor have the character’s themselves been developed enough for anyone to think that this scenario is possible. The women agree to bail her out instead of taking a chance.

Greta, the woman with a brother that has an underground training facility and seems to know a little something about everything, predicts her bail amount and decides to call in a favor to get the money. She calls her ex, the one that she hated and killed her baby. Why? Well, the characters actually ask that question, but the answer is obvious… to kill him. They create a plan, execute the plan, and all of this is over the course of two-thirds of the comic.

Again, this isn’t a comic. It looks like one, it seems like one, it has art like one, but it’s a tv script. There’s zero build up to killing these dudes; there’s no emotional payoff for the women getting their revenge. It’s just a bunch of angry faces and exposition. Maybe someone with acting chops could have brought forth some emotions from these characters, but there’s none coming through in the dialogue, sorry exposition, or the artwork. There are huge jumps in time, pointless scenes of people talking about things that lose relevancy in the next scene and a breakneck pacing that doesn’t seem to understand that making a lot of boring crap read quickly doesn’t make it better.

There is still zero-character development in this series. The fucking brother is developed better than any of our main characters. The one woman that doesn’t want to be a part of the plan is still allowed to know everything about the plans, and then the fucking cops show up to talk to her. What? What? WHY? Where was the lead into this? Hell, who’s running the house they’re all staying in and using when they please? Who is helping them with their legal battles? Why is one of them working her old job at a diner? Can any of the relevant character questions be answered in this book? The short answer is of course no.

The artwork, while tolerable last time, is just frustrating as hell this time. The same problems of the first issue persist. Weird shadowing, shifting facial features, it’s all still here. Not that I expected it to leave since this series is likely already completed and just waiting for release, but it was just more frustrating to see this time around. Really, it’s amazing that the artist is able to produce any kind of cohesive visual story given how terrible the pacing is for it. There’s nothing sequential about this comic, which is the number one reason of why it’s not a comic. Still, that aside, the art has its fair share of problems.

Well, having given this series two issues to impress it is unlikely that I’ll bother reviewing the rest of it. I’ll still read it so that I can accurately label it on my “Worst of 2017” list at the end of the year; it’s already got a cozy spot on the list. Just have to figure out if I’m going to put it under comics or TV.

Score: 1/5

Sisters of Sorrow #2
Publisher: BOOM! Studios