Villordsutch reviews Shotgun Wedding #3…
“Mike Stone wants nothing more than to marry the woman of his dreams. Denise is smart, sexy, teaches the second grade, and loves Mike more than anything in the world. What she doesn’t know is that Mike is one of the world’s top assassins and was once engaged to a fellow assassin named Chloe. And when Mike abandoned Chloe on their wedding day, she vowed revenge…”
As a person who’s experienced his own wedding only once and attended other weddings in his time I can be somewhat thankful that my joy-filled day of bliss wasn’t as packed full of surprises as Denise and Mike’s big day. I can also thank my lucky stars that I have no skeletons tucked away in my cupboard that could, without blinking, murder the Vicar binding us together and during the sentence of, “Do you take…”
We have here a Wedding Planners nightmare! I would say the wedding to end all weddings but as a Game of Thrones fan that bar has been really raised high. However, this one gives it a fair crack of the whip as Chloe (Mike’s ex-bride to be) and her merry gang of hitmen and women who clearly are neither with the bride nor groom make their rude entry and set to work with vicious smirks, bullets and knock-out gas.
William Harris weaves between this disaster of a wedding the chance meeting, two years earlier, of Denise and Mike and how one small universal bump can start the avalanche we are seeing in the present day. How these moments can effect one person in such a way that they in turn make such decisions that can affect many. These choices made have caused so much damage; mentally for Chloe, who we discover was left waiting at the Church in her wedding dress not believing that for one moment her love would leave her, and physical for the wedding guests and Denise who is now discovering some truths about Mike.
Edward Pun handles the art in all aspects of the action amazingly well from the frantic movements of storming the wedding to the almost glacial stillness of two years before for Mike. On top of this again we have the fantastic use of shadow and shading achieved by the black & white artwork throughout the comic, and again giving us an excellent cover that I can’t help but smirk at knowing what is actually within these pages.
It’s clear these opening comics are the start of something big: the Assassin “Guild” run by the Turk, Clint (the handler), Mikes eBaying revealed and I’m hoping something more from Denise other than a one-dimensional nondescript character we’ll get a white rabbit in a top hat. I’m looking forward to seeing what issue #4 of Shotgun Wedding is going to give us, and I’m guessing it’s going to be messy.
Villordsutch likes his sci-fi and looks like a tubby Viking according to his children. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.
Originally published April 16, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
