Monogamy is overrated. Always have a side-piece ready… Words to live by?

Writer: David Pepose
Artist: Gavin Guidry
Colors: Liz Kramer
Letters: Ariana Maher w/Colin Bell
Covers: Lisa Sterle; Maan House; Gavin Guidry
Publisher: Action Labs

I’m not a big fan of cliches. Or, if they’re in a story, I expect them to be subverted. Which is why I  am so disappointed in this issue of Going to the Chapel. I spent the entirety of the issue expecting something so much more clever than the cliffhanger we got. Mostly because the entire 24 previous pages gave me so many engaging and interesting characters.

Let me backup…

We meet bride to be Emily and her fiance Jesse on the hours leading up to their nuptials. Jesse is head over heels for his wife to be, but Emily? Not so much. While she does seem to love Jesse it’s a question of whether she’s in love with him, something she should’ve answered for herself long before she got to this point.

Meanwhile there’s a heist afoot and at least one other player on the board who has some thoughts on this wedding.

Right up until the end David Pepose gives us an engaging storyline with multiple moving parts and some really great characters: every woman in Emily’s family is a friggin’ treasure and I can’t wait to see more of them going forward, particularly her sister Lucy and her Lucille Bluth-esq mother. Jesse himself comes across as adorable with just enough something else to be interesting and not boring.

Unfortunately, there’s that final page. It’s such a bodice ripper type turn – that does Emily’s character no favors considering the actual things that happened in the moments before – that it totally ripped me out of the storyline and frankly turned me off Emily completely.

It’s a shame too because Gavin Guidry and Liz Kramer’s artwork is absolutely phenomenal. As anyone who’s read my reviews knows I’m all about the faces. I love it when an artist makes a point of making every character we see look different, or in the case of Emily’s family, just enough alike that at a glance I can tell who is who. This book has that in spades as no one is left to just be background and every detail is attended to wonderfully.

Overall, I actually did enjoy this book but I don’t know if this is a series I’ll be getting in full until issue 2 comes out and we see the fallout from that final page.

Four Lilacs out of Five