MixedThe Comics JournalThe central choice might be to decide whether your existing artistic trajectory has reached full flower and it is time to move onto the risky high-wire of something new, or instead maintain the course that got you to this peak and just go do that voodoo that you do. Acting Class is the latter, new characters animated by something very like the established spirit, in a story inflated to a larger diameter from the inside ... The length is down to the plot, following a dozen working class individuals as their storylines come together, separate, and come together again ... When the story aims for poignancy, on the whole the eyes don\'t have it. When it touches on historic sexual assault and child abuse, the affect puts distance between reader and character just at the point where you need to get your bearings ... Although wanting comics art to be elegant and slick and to hold your hand is a road to nowhere, there\'s still a difference between drawings made ungainly to imbue them with power and drawings that are just ungainly. That difference is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, like most are. But if an artist reopens a seam of gold that led a previous work to \'advance beyond the comics that preceded it,\' then it\'s fair to ask whether the new comic built on that hot frontier is making you think, or just making you read.
