Alias Red Band #1: Back in Force

Humphries wastes little time giving Jessica Jones a new case in Alias Red Band #1. He doesn’t dwell on the circumstances that Jessica finds herself in now, merely showing that Alias Investigations is closed before getting the series’ story going.

The inciting incident is a gruesome one. Humphries, Borges, and Hesli don’t skimp on the gruesome factor on the corpses Jessica finds. The bloody mouthed rats that have been gnawing on the bodies add a particular kind of distastefulness. Alias Red Band #1 leaves no confusion about it being a Red Band series. The splash page also establishes high stakes from the outset. Jessica isn’t going to be investigating anything like a standard private eye case.

That gruesome moment having set the stage, Humphries takes time to fill the reader in on the deeper status quo for Jessica. He accomplishes this principally through an extended scene between her and her husband, Luke Cage. Humphries fills the conversation with acrimony. The result is that by the time it’s over, a wedge exists between them for the purpose of this story. Humphries successfully sets this up as a purely Jessica Jones story.

Adding Typhoid Mary gives Humphries the opportunity to work in some very offbeat humor. This is not Typhoid Mary’s sole purpose in the story. Humphries sets her up as a key character in the story. But at the same time, her interaction with Jessica successfully defuses the tension created in the Jessica/Luke scene.

Borges keeps all of these dialogue sequences energetic by delivering very expressive characters. Linework is fairly conservative–Borges limits most of it to building cheekbones and detailing eyes. The expressive nature of most characters comes from the work Borges does on characters’ eyes. The net effect is broad emotional displays–sometimes to the point of over exaggeration. But whether over exaggerated or not, it results in dynamic character interactions.

This style works especially well in both the Jessica/Luke scene and the Jessica/Typhoid Mary scene. The page design during these scenes keep them moving at a surprisingly fast clip for all-dialogue sequences. Small panels featuring closeups on characters’ faces stretch across two page spreads, eventually overlapping. The scenes become rapid fire exchanges.

Petit’s lettering plays into the intense rapid fire sequences as well. Dialogue bubbles extend from one panel to the other. Caption boxes containing Jessica’s internal monologue are interspersed throughout both characters’ dialogue. Bubbles overlap. It reads very fast.

Hesli makes creative color choices that play heavily into the mood of scenes. In the rapid fire dialogue sequence between Jessica and Luke, the background colors are consistent for each character until suddenly one panel with Jessica switches to an all red background. This is followed by two panels, at the most intense moment in the characters’ argument, of the panel’s color scheme going to red and white. This style choice is repeated later during the Jessica/Typhoid Mary sequence. Another creative choice Hesli makes during the Jessica/Typhoid Mary scene is to use a warm red/pink backlight on the wall of a bar. As the scene goes on, the changing point of view determines whether the two characters are in cold shadow as seen from one side of the bar or bathed in warm light when seen from the other.