Published By: Image Comics
Written By: Rob Williams
Illustrated By: Simon Fraser and Gary Caldwell
Price: $3.99

Kingsman closes out its Red Diamond arc with all the uncorked pizazz that dominates the big screen depiction of the British superspy. They pulled out all the bells and whistles for this farewell send off to such a charged up miniseries. The setting is iconic. Eggsy and his partner-by-forced-circumstances are trapped at the bottom of the ocean inside of a highly pressurized bad guy hideout, with zero access to any computer anywhere on the planet because they’ve all been shut down. The code breaker who created the virus, who is also the one they need to rescue so he can reverse it, is just a few feet away from them chained up Slave Leia style to the big bad himself!

Who is sitting on a pile of gold and assorted gems!

Oh, and if they kill him, the air locks will all open and everyone will die from the violent explosion of water pressure.

It’s absolutely over the top in every feasible way, and it makes it oddly charming somehow. While the storyline itself is pretty straightforward- villain turned off all computers in order to free humanity from its slavery to money and assert himself as world king- watching it unravel was rather fun. Kind of the like an episode of Scooby-Doo; you know they’re going to get out of this ridiculous scenario somehow, but that’s what makes the show fun. Not for the ending. For the journey. How are they going to get out of this now, with all of this stacked against them?

It’s a fun issue to read. The only disconcerting elements were, surprisingly, the artistry. The artistic style is obviously intended to be gaudy, but there’s a listing tilt to the gaudiness that smudges the effect of the work over the senses. The action scenes and big moments are starkly vibrant, but when we zero in on the facial expressions it’s not as smooth. They look forced. There’s also a bit of dissonance between the younger depiction of Eggsy on the cover and the aged up version we get inside the book itself.

On the whole, though, this spy-tastic roller coaster was a great whirl that capped off in fireworks at harvest time fashion. I enjoyed myself with this book.

4.3 Poison Darts out of 5