Deathstroke: The Terminator #2: Hunt or be Hunted

The second issue of Deathstroke: The Terminator is written with a touch of poetic vengeance. It’s not exactly what you would probably expect out of a Deathstroke story, but it’s an interesting lens to analyze the character under. It’s clear that Fleecs is taking the deconstruction route, something no one else has really done with the world’s greatest assassin. The more delicate tone this creates is underscored by the expected violence of a Deathstroke title.

Each character, even the background ones, is written with a distinct and memorable personality in issue #2, from one mercenary completely quitting the job when he sees Deathstroke in full form, to another that goes down fighting against someone clearly more dangerous than they are.

In the carnage of an all-out battle, one nameless soldier realizes what’s going on. He comments on the fact that he and Slade were probably hired by the same person. The short interaction gives the soldier so much presence on the page despite being the same design as a handful of others who are used as fodder for Slade to hack and slash his way through.

Leveraging the rules that Slade himself established in Deathstroke Inc. as a way to push the story off course is brilliant. He can’t just take the name of his target by force, he has to earn the cash back to buy it. It’s a simple way to make the character work for the storyline to progress and makes the eventual conclusion feel earned rather than just written into some plot outline.

Carmine Di Giandomenico’s art is intense. Everything explodes and slices and shoots and gets shot. Di Giandomenico uses these wide panels to create scenes that pan large rooms or make small spaces feel large with the weight of the story. Full single pages are stacked with different types of standardized panels in easy-to-follow sequences that provide glimpses into different parts of the scene. Some pages use this as the lever by which the story progresses; an intense scene is captured in a full single page while what happens next is laid out moment to moment in small panels.

There is so much creativity in the artwork, such as Slade’s safe house with its giant assault rifles the size of small buildings or the bounce of an explosive that sends the artwork and the pace of the story reeling into its final act before next month’s issue #3.

Ivan Plascencia’s colors have a shifting temperature to them. The heat of an explosion-filled firefight is contrasted against colder, soft daylight and a pale blue sky. There is consistent lighting even between two vastly different pages that would be harder to track if not for Plascencia’s work on the issue’s colors and textures. It makes the issue feel surprisingly cohesive by the last page.