There’s a lot going on in The Bulletproof Coffin, and while the coloring choices remain the most compelling component of the artwork for me, the stocky manchild proportions and occasionally anatomically indifferent depictions of women really throw some rust on the story’s flow from time to time — and I can’t figure out if that’s 100% intentional or not. The story is a commentary on masculine hero fantasies and boyhood hang-ups, so I tend to think that it is, but this series really grinds its nose hard into ambiguous territory.
Somewhere in inspired orbit around the meta-medium storytelling of Watchmen and the devil-may-care aloofness of the pacing in a Love and Rockets issue, Coffin has found a voice, though, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be picking up the rest of the miniseries. Shaky Kane’s neo-juvenile pyschedelia and the understated madness in David Hine’s script here both have a unique energy that rarely surfaces in pamphlet comics. It’s the kind of content you’d expect from a minicomic but wrapped up and produced as an Image book.