Originally posted on Irish Comic News (19/Jan/2017)
Sons of Anarchy Redwood Original #5
Written by Ollie Masters.
Line Art by Eoin Marron.
Colour Art by Adam Metcalfe.
Letters by Ed Dukeshire.
Cover by Brahm Revel.Sons of Anarchy Redwood Original follows the story of Jax Teller, a teenager just out of high school. The series follows him as he decides to prospect the Sons of Anarchy, a club that counted his deceased father and his stepfather as members.
I’ve not read the preceding four issues so I’ll be working out the story purely based on issue 5.
The Sons of Anarchy have a problem with an unknown gunman whom I gather has possibly stolen drugs or guns from the Sons of Anarchy. The Sons of Anarchy are trying to figure out how to resolve the problem without losing face amongst the biker community. Meanwhile, Jax is a guest of Opie and his father while he works on a way to get back into Clays good books.
As someone who has watched the TV show I found the comic to be quite close to the spirit of the show. It’s interesting to read about characters you’re familiar with from the show in a story set before the time of the show itself.
But the biggest thing that put this issue on my ‘must-buy’ list was that this issue was the US comic debut of Irish comic artist Eoin Marron. I’d see various pieces of his work shared via his Twitter account but I hadn’t read a 22-page comic produced by him so I just had to check this out.
Marron and Metcalfe work well together and produce a comic that looks great and has good readability. I really enjoyed re-reading the comic just to look over it from an art, layout and panel point-of-view.
The art is well placed with regard to the dialogue in that the dialogue doesn’t look like it was crammed in. Equally with panels where there is a lot in the background, the line art and colours make sure that what is important in the panel isn’t obscured. It was also nice that the center of the comic has two entirely wordless pages, thus requiring the art to do all the story.
It’s great to see an Irish getting their work into the US comics and displaying a really good understanding of putting a comic together. It’ll be interesting to see how Marron develops his art as he gets more comics under his belt. It was an great start and I look forward to reading more comics by Marron.
In closing, you’re a fan of the show then I’d really recommend it as it adds to the Sons of Anarchy world.