There’s a moment in Dan Abnett’s and John Romita Junior’s The Silencer #1 where the book almost becomes fun.
Main character Honor Guest is putting away groceries in the parking lot of a supermarket when she’s accosted by a biomechanical thug whose name is about as ridiculous as his look. Over the next several panels she demolishes this baddy with colored pencils and a pretty cool superpower while her kid plays with his action figures in the car. It evident that Abnett and Romita had a great time writing this bit. If the rest of the issue were as good as these first several pages, then The Silencer would have been a surefire hit.
Unfortunately thats not the case. What makes the first pages work is a balance between slice of life suburbia and the high octane intrigue of a thriller. Abnett’s sells this new character so well here, and even injects the script with a dose of humor. All of this is gone by the time a certain Batman villian decides to pop in the neighborhood.
The idea of a reformed super-assassin isn’t a new one. When the Silencer focuses too much on that aspect of Honor Guest her charm as an eveywoman is submerged. None of this is bad, per se, but the sense of freshness from the intro is replaced by something more familiar. Honor’s love of her ‘ordinary life’ is a big facet of her characte. Abnett makes this poignantly clear early on, and these scenes of Honor with her family are genuinely enjoyable to read. Its concerning that Abnett shelves all that slice of life stuff to focus on the action so quickly.
Romita and White bring a bright, highly stylized tone to the artwork. Romita’s pencils are more cartoonish than most of his peers, but they fit the book’s more outlandish elements. His work is a bit more stiff in the quiter scenes, however, and the anatomy of his figures can be odd for people used to more realistic styles. His longtime collaborator Dean White enlivens each panel with his bright hues. Taken together they are one of the strongest art teams working in comics, but its questionable whether such colorful art is a good fit for a book as dark as this.
Rating: 7.0
-Andrew Fontana
