Jason Aaron is boiling over with empathy. He’s professed his love for grey-area characters, and that love is genuine. No one in an Aaron story is all-good or all-bad and he feels for them all.

I had metatextual hate for Dog: bad character from a bad series that was a bad idea born of corporate copyright fight. Poochie would’ve been an easier dog to love.
Until now. My post-modern character hate was defeated with post-modern tools. Dog’s desire to be the one stories are written about, in the face of the fact that his brother is maybe the most written-about character in comics, floods him with pathos.

Ramon Perez suffers from the fact that we were just blessed with the perfect vehicle for his explosive imagination. Like watching Donald O’Connor outside of singing in the rain. He’s good, but he’s not gonna make ’em laugh like he did there. After last issue, I resigned myself to the fact that I’m not gonna be treated to a trip into his head and started appreciating what he’s showing here: Kirby-level kinetics and Alex Robinson-level acting. He gave work worthy of a 5, but he can go to 11.

And Laura Martin! I don’t have the vocabulary to adequately express what she does here. It’s not just setting cues a la Soderbergh’s Traffic. The grey-scale on page 1 wrings emotion out of a cloak in ways I didn’t imagine possible.