| Human Target: Strike Zones |
 I really enjoyed the first two Human Target books that writer Peter Milligan had penned. So much so that I even gave one of them as a gift to my father last Christmas. Milligan has created a great crime/thriller series with strong focus on the psychological. A little over a year ago, based on the success of the first two books, DC started a Human Target ongoing monthly also written by Milligan. Now, I didn't have room in my monthly comic buying budget to fit this in, even though I knew I would enjoy it. So I decided to wait for the first trade paperback collection to come out - correctly assuming that DC would release a collection of the first few stories from the monthly series - and pay for it out of my yearly tpb budget. Human Target: Strikes Zones is the first three stories (6 issues) of the monthly Human Target series.
The book picks up where Final Cut left off as Christopher Chance, the Human Target, comes out of his total immersion in his last case. He then heads to New York where he finds more opportunities to use his skills as the man of a million faces. Milligan has got a great thing in the character of Chance. Because of the character's chameleon-like abilities, Milligan is free to tell any story he feels. There's no constraint to genres or spandex. Milligan's free to explore America through Chance in any fashion he wants - all he needs to do is re-invent Christopher Chance. What I particularly enjoy about Milligan's writing is that regardless of what the story is about, he always has one theme that plays through everywhere. Identity. What is fact and what is fiction? Are we who we really think we are? That is the line that strings all the different stories together. Chance's struggle to understand who he really is. Something that becomes increasingly more difficult as he throws himself into impersonating more and more people. The Human Target books, as envisioned by Peter Milligan, are another example of comics that I'll proudly hold up as an example of the comic industry at it's best. Intelligent entertainment. I highly recommend any of the Human Target books you can get a hold of. Just make sure they've got Milligan's name on them. |