Danger Street #10: Dragons, Knights, and Monsters? Oh My!

Danger Street #10 has things coming down to the wire. As all of the players in this series slowly start to coalesce as each of their individual journeys have brought them closer and closer together. Whereas the last issue saw the thematic and undoubtedly contextual battle between Manhunter and Codename: Assassin, Danger Street #10 sees the characters deal with the ramifications. As each issue grows closer and closer to the grand finale, mysteries slowly have started to unravel, and the profound character work early on starts to pay off.

This issue’s focus on Jack Ryder/The Creeper seems to highlight a lot of what has been built up surrounding the character since the first issue. In his introduction it was apparent that Jack was emblematic of the popular right wing news hosts of today, hypocritically spouting “alternative facts” purely based on their boss’s goals and ambitions. Here that seemingly comes full circle as it is revealed that The Green Team had always known of Jack’s alter ego, and were fully aware of his hypocritical opinions towards costumed vigilantes. Tom King seems to go all in against Jack here, proving that he is the spineless virtue seeking person that fans have seen him as all along. This was an excellent example of King’s attention to detail and truly enforces the series’ overarching themes and messages.

Jorge Fornes never ceases to amaze with this series. From the small, minute details, all the way to the fantastic realism, Fornes truly gives this series something special that makes it unique every month. In this issue, Fornes once again gets to delve a little bit into Jack Kirby’s Fourth World. In this, he delivers an excellent full page image of Darksied’s grimacing expression. This image has to be one of the best depictions of the character in a long time, highlighting his otherworldly features on a familiar, humanlike face. This image is one that is destined to come across Fornes’s table at his next comic convention as a high demand print that people will be pining for.

Colorist Dave Stewart continues to do an excellent job in contrasting the realism with these fantastical characters, something that is especially apparent as this book reaches its conclusion. The weird and the realistic are slowly blending together, creating a lot of fun images for Stewart to put his mark on. As this world starts to fall apart, it will be interesting to see how Stewart continues to blend these contrasting images and how this will thematically tie into the overall narrative.

Rounding out the creative team is Clayton Cowles on letters. Cowles always does a fantastic job and Danger Street #10 is not an exception. With an emphasis on the pages where The Creeper does his thing, Cowles has a lot of fun with onomatopoeia, making this classic comic book character feel like he’s as classic as ever. Cowles also does a great job modifying and designing speech bubbles to help emphasize a character’s specific speech patterns. This enhances the reading and helps give unique voices to these characters.