Fool Moon enters the home stretch in issue seven, with Harry escaping one group of werewolf captors before taking the offensive with some lycanthropes of his own. Here’s the official description from Dynamite:

A Werewolf war has broken out in Chicago-and everyone of the snarling beasts seems to have it in for Harry! Now, it’s the Streetwolves-a lycanthropic biker gang who may just hate Harry enough to draw the wrath of country’s most powerful gangster. And the werewolf faction that started the blood-soaked conflict is about to be revealed…

Adapting material into a new medium is always tricky. Unfortunately, Mark Powers makes a major error here in Fool Moon #7 by including massive amounts of narration, constantly telling when he should be showing. Harry literally tells us almost everything that happens, as it’s happening. Here’s a direct quote:

“I piled into the back of the van with the Alphas, who now looked more like a bunch of geeky college students than feral animals.”

There’s absolutely nothing in that statement that we shouldn’t be able to see on our own just by looking at the page. It’s like Powers lifted a lot of this text directly from Jim Butcher‘s novel, which makes reading it in comic form nearly pointless, especially considering…

…Chris Conley‘s art lacks so much. A number of the characters are difficult to tell apart. Features and figures are too blocky, so everyone looks like they got hit by the ugly stick. In at least one panel, Conley’s attempt to foreshorten Harry’s arms makes him look like Plastic Man. Finally, two women are seen completely naked, in multiple panels, and are not the least bit attractive. The book is rated 16+, so they can’t look like a Playboy spread, but that doesn’t mean they have to look like a Cubist painting either.

Strangest of all is the fact that Conley also did the cover, which is a perfectly good piece of work. It suggests that he was aiming for a particular look with the interior art and just completely missed the mark.

The whole point of reading an adaptation like this is the art, as most readers will already be aware of the story. So when the art fails as badly as it does in Fool Moon #7, the book’s not even worth picking up.

2/5