Doomquest #4: A Love Story

Doomquest #4 is a love story. Doom says as much on the first page. Doomquest spent the last two issues being a complicated but generally fun time travel romp. North takes the series in a different direction here, eschewing a plot heavy time travel story in favor of pure character exploration as he reunites Doom with Valeria, the love of Doom’s life.

North’s story sees Doom eschew his goal of Latverian ascendancy in favor of a normal life with his true love. Like the previous time travel issues in the series, Doomquest #4 is told almost entirely via Doom’s internal monologue. This reliance on Doom’s internal monologue creates a kind of tell-don’t-show narrative structure (with Mobili’s shouldering a lot of the emotional weight of the issue). But there is a virtue in telling the story this way. Doom is the one relating his thoughts and feelings to the reader, and North has been writing a very honest Doom. It’s quite effective.

The end of Doomquest #4 is shocking in a way but also predictable and necessary given who Doom is and what his chief motivations are. What Doom says and does is hardly a revelation. But coming as it does on the heels of such an unexpected character oriented issue shows off North’s familiarity with the character. North pushes the story as close to tragedy as it can go, but at the end of the day he doesn’t try to say that Doom is someone other than who he has always been shown to be.

A large part of Doom’s emotional journey in Doomquest #4 is told via montage. North hits on the high points in text via Doom’s internal monologue, but it’s Mobili that communicates the emotion of Doom’s journey. Mobili is liberal with his line work on characters. Much of the high level of detail comes via what looks like back and forth scribbled lines. Mobili’s style creates a significant dimension on characters without relying on heavy shading. This is especially effective with characters’ facial features. Doom and Valeria are very expressive, and it’s that expressiveness that tells the story of their romance.

D’Armata does a good job adjusting colors in response to implied light sources. These shifts are generally subtle. The style works very well with Mobili’s art. Mobili’s back and forth line work adds depth to these color shifts as opposed to interrupting them with bigger patches of shading.

With so much of the story told via art montages, placement of caption boxes is key to not detract from those visuals. Lanham does a very good job keeping them out of the way. The color choice for both the fill and border of those boxes ensures that they don’t get lost on the page, but at the same time their positioning does not detract from the artwork.