New Kid In Town: Talon #1 Review

I don’t know a lot about magic beyond getting hammered and watching my Penn & Teller: Bullshit DVDs, but even with my limited background, I question whether or not Talon #1 writer James Tynion IV knows exactly what an escape artist actually does. If Harry Houdini could do the things that title character Calvin Rose is capable of, we would never have had a Second World War because the first time they drew the curtain on him in the Chinese Water Torture in New York, they would have reopened it three minutes later to discover Houdini in a dry tuxedo, standing outside a tank containing an adolescent Adolf Hitler, clawing frantically at the glass.

Seriously, if any magician could do what Talon does, they would not be performing for screeching children at rotten birthday parties except maybe as a front for their lucrative paid assassination careers. Penn and Teller would not be doing a residency at the Rio Casino in Vegas, as they would be too busy robbing its vault empty on a nightly fucking basis. This, however is not a bad thing, for a few reasons, the first being that a comic book about a guy tensing his wrists to provide slack to eventually escape handcuffs would be boring, particularly after he was shot in the face as soon as the handcuffs were locked. And second, because Tynion is using the escape artist / magician hook to show some action presented in a real clever way, and to present a protagonist who, at least so far, isn’t concerned with beating the bad guy, but beating the bad guy so he can get away.

So we’ve got a clearly unrealistic escape artist protagonist who fights only to escape, but still, one who acts in a kinda cool and interesting way, and has a tendency to mouth off and sometimes panic and run while he’s fighting. So does that make for a good and entertaining comic book?