Last time, we analyzed the plot and artwork of the second story in the magazine, "Who are these guys?" (And in case you want to find it, here's the review of the first story)
On the pages between the end of "Who Are These Guys" and the start of todays story, "Dangerous Secrets" there's an interview between Shinji Mikami, the creator of Resident Evil, and someone from WildStorm about the design of the original game, as well as some content that was cut from the final product. I say "someone" because it doesn't actually tell us who's conducting the interview. They just use the initials "WS"
Anyways, the interview is pretty interesting for someone like me, who's interested in game design, as well as the Resident Evil series. Mikami talks about how he wanted to make a game that could both scare the player and be enjoyable as well.
He also mentions that his inspiration for the zombies as the main antagonists in the game was George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.
Mikami mentions that the American version of the game was made much harder than the Japanese version because they wanted rental copies of the game to not be beaten during the rental period.
Looking back at my playthrough of Resident Evil, it didn't exactly take me a single day to beat it. Eventually I'm gonna go back and play through the original game and the remake on the harder difficulties for the sake of putting together a better playthrough for my channel.
Mikami also mentions that there were two characters that wound up being cut from the final game. One was a man with an infrared scope in place of his missing eye and a pair of automatic shotguns strapped to his back. There's a drawing of him on the second page of the interview by Carlos D'Anda, which looks like someone took Barry Burton and combined him with Albert Wesker and Cable from The X-Men. This is an example of pretty good '90s artwork, but that's just because he looks like Cable. Mikami mentions that this character was eventually refined into Barry Burton.
The second character who was cut was a lanky comedy character, who was intended to contrast with the horror of the game. Considering how comedic the final version of the game was, I have to wonder how his comedy would have been written. I wonder if the intentional humor would have been as funny as the unintentional comedy.
The drawing of this character looks like a mashup of Forest Speyer and Kenneth Sullivan, with a few elements of Barry and Chris thrown in for the hell of it. I don't like the drawing of him as much as I liked the other. Neither of them are particularly well-polished, but the inked outlines on this drawing look sloppy, and the coloring is a bit muddy.
Let's move on from these pages and dig into the third story; "Dangerous Secrets"
We open to a full-page spread of what I assume is supposed to be the S.T.A.R.S. office in the RCPD building. We can see four of the five (Technically six, but we won't see Wesker again until Code:V) surviving members of the team gathered around a large table. Fortunately, all of the characters look more like their concept art than they did in the last two stories. Jill's arms are still a little too slender for the level of training she's supposed to have, but at least she's not as off-model as she was in the last story. Also, they seem to have four massive flat-screen TV's attached to the ceiling. One shows the smoldering remains of the mansion, another shows the approximate blast radius of the self-destruct charges, one just has static, and the last monitor shows the heat-signature of the burning forest.
Something weird I noticed is the art. This and the last story were both penciled by the same person, Carlos D'Anda. All three of these stories so far have all been inked by the same person too, Mark Irwin.
The thing is that everyone on this page actually resembles their in-game counterparts, including Jill. For the most part, this carries through the rest of the story (aside from some coloring issues) and it's just kind of strange that Jill looked so terrible at the end of the last story.
The narration captions let us know that this is the main debriefing room at S.T.A.R.S. headquarters, two days after the surviving S.T.A.R.S. members escaped the mansion.
First things first, this looks nothing like the conference-room from the RCPD building. Second, we repeat the problem of the first story where the members of S.T.A.R.S. are wearing their combat gear even when they're inside their own headquarters and off-duty. It's like they haven't changed out of their gear in three days.
Chris is taking charge, and mentions that it's his job to make sure that nothing like the mansion incident ever happens again.
Excuse me, but who put you in charge? Wesker's presumed dead, and Chief Irons has it out for the S.T.A.R.S. members. I know S.T.A.R.S. is supposed to be independent from the RCPD, but who exactly appointed Chris the head of this S.T.A.R.S. team? I'm not averse to Chris leading the remaining members of S.T.A.R.S, but I'd just like to know who put him in charge and how the command-structure of S.T.A.R.S. works in this continuity.
This whole story is essentially a summarized version of the game. Narration from Chris explains that a week ago, they got a request from the RCPD for them to help in the investigation into the recent rash of brutal murders.
Bravo was sent in to investigate the forest, but their chopper broke down, and they had to make an emergency landing. Rebecca mentions that they survived the crash, but were immediately attacked by the Cerberus's in the area. Naturally, they booked it out of there and took cover in the mansion. Once inside, they split up to secure the area.
This contradicts modern canon quite a bit, since they didn't go directly to the mansion, instead finding a Jeep overturned in the woods with a pair of dead MP's in it. Rebecca was caught on a train and met up with Billy Coen, but anyone who's played Resident Evil Zero knows that. But as far as then-current canon goes, it fits perfectly. Then again, Resident Evil Zero is barely canon anyways, so it doesn't really matter.
Rebecca questions the loyalties of Enrico because he was the one who told them to split-up. That's incredibly unfair, but that's also beside the point, so let's move on.
Chris's narration boxes mention that they lost contact with Bravo, and so Alpha was sent in. They don't mention that Brad panicked and flew off in their helicopter after Joseph was eaten by the Cerberus, just that Chris, Barry, Jill, and Wesker made it to the mansion intact. Not mentioning the fact that Alpha was attacked shortly after they landed makes you wonder why they went to the mansion, especially since Chris mentions that they didn't know Bravo was inside the mansion.
Before moving onto the next page, we're going to look at the art on this page, page twenty.
The first panel shows a newspaper with a dead hiker on the front page. He appears to be surrounded by intestines, but it seems like there are too many around him to actually fit into his body. Also, we see Carlos D'Anda's name on the newspaper for some reason. Is that supposed to be the name of the hiker? I don't know.
The second panel is showing Bravo's chopper from below as they fly into the forest. This looks pretty good, aside from the incredibly out-of-place smoke drawing. It looks like something made of plastic, rather than a plume of smoke coming out of the chopper.
The third panel shows Rebecca sitting in a chair, talking. This panel is fine, aside from the white outline of Rebecca's glove against the table, which makes it look like it's not supposed to be there.
The final panel on this page is supposed to show Chris, Jill, Barry and Wesker running into the mansion, but we only see three of them clearly to tell that they're actually the S.T.A.R.S. team, but we see five figures on this page, including the three people who are clearly S.T.A.R.S. members, which doesn't really make sense. Maybe one is a zombie.
Moving onto the next page, we see Chris standing behind a zombie who's eating Kenneth's intestines. Chris's narration captions mention that fact, and then Jill says that she heard a scream from upstairs (No she didn't, because the only sounds they heard in the game were gunshots from the west-wing of the mansion.) and decided to investigate. She found the body of Forest Speyer with his eyes gouged out by birds.
The first of the three panels on this page shows the zombie eating Kenneth, as I mentioned before.
Here's the problem. In the game, the zombie was chewing on Ken's throat, and hadn't torn out his guts.
First off, what's the obsession with drawing intestines sprawled out around dead bodies? There always seem to be more intestines around the bodies than the human body actually has.
Second, in the game, Ken was lying on his back. In this, he's sort-of laying on his side. He's also got a massive chunk out of his skull for some reason. Another thing, how did that zombie manage to rip through Kenneth's Kevlar vest? Those things can stop bullets and knives, but not the teeth and nails of a rotting corpse? And yes, later on in the comic they actually confirm that their S.T.A.R.S. vests are made of Kevlar.
Also, Kenneth is missing the S.T.A.R.S. lettering on his shoulder emblem. Remember that, it's gonna come up later.
Moving onto the second panel on the page, Jill looks kinda sleepy. Considering what she's been through, I wouldn't be surprised if she hasn't had much sleep the last two days.
The final panel on the page shows Forest getting his eyes ripped-out by the birds. This panel is fine, but the problem is that Forest was leaning up against the railing of the balcony in the game. But in the comic, he's lying on his back.
Page twenty-two is a little strange. The narration captions are the same color as Chris's, but the comic cuts to pictures of Jill's eyes between the panels, implying that she's the one who's narrating right now. But if she was, wouldn't the boxes be a different color? Also, why are Chris's narration boxes yellow in this comic? His vest is green, and that's the color one would normally associate with him. Either that, or the brownness of his hair, but then again, everyone's hair is brown in this.
Whoever the hell is narrating this says that they found Richard Aiken after being bitten and tried to save him, but he died in their arms. This panel makes me wonder how exactly he managed to survive his encounter with the Yawn when he was halfway into its mouth.
As they went through the Spencer Mansion, they ran around, killing monsters and then eventually found Enrico Marini in the caverns below the mansion, but Wesker shot him dead before he could tell them anything more than the fact that there was a traitor in S.T.A.R.S.
Chris says that with the evidence found by himself, Jill, and Barry, he was able to piece together what happened at the mansion.
It's pretty much note for note what the plot of the game was. Wesker was a plant inside S.T.A.R.S. by Umbrella, and Umbrella wants to create supersoldiers, so they set up their laboratory inside an old mansion in the middle of nowhere because nobody really gave a damn about that area of the forest.
Umbrella discovered the T-Virus, and found out that exposing certain humans and animals to it caused them to become either zombies like most of the humans and the Cerberus's or just massive creatures like The Yawn or The Neptune.
Chris (Or whoever is narrating this) says that it creates the perfect soldier. "Mindless... Fearless... Deadly... And easily disposable."
No, they're not. For one thing, they're impossible to control, and for another thing, the zombification was an accident. Even back in the original game, they didn't know what it was going to do when it was applied to different forms of life. It caused The Neptune and The Yawn to have massive growth-spurts, and Plant 42 metamorphosed into a massive predatory monster. And lest we forget, a strain of the virus also turned Wesker into a death-defying superhuman.
Chris goes on to say that apparently Umbrella wanted to test the effects of the T-Virus on humans, and sacrificed their own researchers for the sake of that.
While Umbrella is the kind of company I'd expect that from, the mansion incident was almost certainly an accident in the original game, and an act of malice by someone who had been betrayed by the Umbrella Corporation in modern continuity. Yeah, the higher-ups at Umbrella did their best to keep the researchers sequestered after infection and also tried to cover everything up afterwards, but the initial outbreak wasn't done on purpose. It wasn't in Umbrella's best interest to infect their research team. And yeah, they should have handled the outbreak better if they really wanted to keep everything under-wraps, but they didn't really know the capabilities of what they were working with. Yes, Umbrella is pretty cartoonish, but they weren't nearly that dumb. The fact of the matter was that the original outbreak was an accident, but some people suspected it was done on purpose. It turned out that it was, but the person who started the whole thing wasn't actually working for Umbrella at the time. Mind you, I tend to prefer to think that Resident Evil 0 doesn't exist, since it serves only to raise questions that are never answered.
Chris goes on to say that he found a letter in the mansion written by John Fay, who was the main character of the second story in the magazine; "Who are these guys?" that confirmed that John had been exposed in that manner.
Yeah, no. I know this could happen either way in the game, but in the comic Jill was the one who found John's office, and Chris was nowhere to be seen.
Chris goes on to say that once humans got exposed and escaped (Completely glossing over the Cerberus's that were running around and who, might I remind you, killed Joseph, one of Chris's teammates) and started terrorizing the area around the town. This narration box is over a picture of a pair of Hunters ripping and tearing some huge guts. Here's the problem. The Hunters aren't actually human. They're part human, but they weren't originally human. They're formed from mixing human DNA and reptilian DNA together and exposing the resulting life-form it to the T-virus. Also, before we move onto the next panel, let's talk about how big the Hunters are compared to the pile of bodies we can see to the left. Yes, the Hunters are supposed to be large, but they're not bigger than human-beings. They're shorter than Jill is in the game!
Here, we can clearly see that they're bigger than the T-002 Tyrant. They're possibly bigger than the Nemesis is! They're also chowing down on some intestines! Gotta love the taste of bowels!
Also, they have weird splotches all over their skin for some reason. Which doesn't make any sense, because the Hunters weren't rotting corpses.
Moving on, Chris mentions that he guesses that Umbrella wanted to test the effectiveness of their T-Virus enhanced supersoldiers against the best of the best. Well, that's sort of true. They wanted to test out the effectiveness of the Hunters, and the Tyrant. But above all else, S.T.A.R.S. was supposed to be the cleanup crew. Umbrella was using S.T.A.R.S. as damage-control, unbeknownst to them. The problem was, they weren't able to completely scrub the mansion of all evidence before they had to send in S.T.A.R.S. because of public demand, which was why Wesker had to handle the evidence cleanup on-site while S.T.A.R.S. was inside the mansion.
Then they go on to reiterate the issue of Bravo being "inexperienced" and being used as the warmup to the main event. Yeah, no. Bravo was just as well-trained as Alpha.
Chris goes on to mention that they discovered Wesker's betrayal the hard way, after finding that Jill was locked up by Wesker.
Before we move on, let's analyze the art. Since I've already covered the Hunters on the first panel, let's skip to the second one.
It's a picture of Chris leaning against the table, holding his right arm out. For some reason, his right hand looks too small for his arm. Not to mention the fact that his mouth looks like he's whistling, rather than talking. Then we come to the S.T.A.R.S. patch on his left arm. First off, the patch is golden-brown, rather than blue, like it's supposed to be. It's almost never colored properly in this story. And the stars in the center of the emblem look nothing like they're supposed to. Plus, the lettering is all derpy. We'll see more of this in the rest of the story.
The next panel is a good drawing of the T-002 Tyrant in its stasis tank.
Then we move onto the fourth panel, which shows a view of Bravo's helicopter from below, with zombies all around.
Then we get to the final panel on the page, which is Jill in the cell. Jill essentially looks fine, but the wall is covered in splotches for some reason.
Then we move onto page twenty-five. They poke a little fun at the non-canon status of the game, since Jill and Chris remember two different versions of events. One where Chris rescued Jill, and one where Jill rescued Chris.
Chris found Rebecca (With no explanation as to how) Chris and Rebecca headed for the control-room, where they met Wesker, who unloaded his pistol into Rebecca. Rebecca pipes up on this page, and her narration boxes are green. That doesn't make any sense, since her vest is white, and that's what people remember about her. Green should be Chris's color, as I mentioned earlier.
Chris then says that Wesker dragged him into the control-room, where he saw the T-002 Tyrant for the first time. Wesker then woke up the Tyrant and got stabbed through the chest by it.
The first panel shows Chris and Jill talking to each other. Chris's face and body look fine, but the patch on his shoulder is black now, instead of bronze like it was in the previous panels. It's at least competently drawn this time (Except for the stars in the center) but it's missing the RCPD lettering in the circle around the stars.
Jill essentially looks fine in this, aside from the fact that the shape of her mouth doesn't really match the expression the rest of her face is making.
Then we get to the second panel. Ideally speaking, Jill and Barry should have been with Chris and Rebecca in the final showdown if they wanted to combine the Jill and Chris halves of the game. Otherwise, it doesn't make any sense for Chris and Rebecca to be the only ones that confront Wesker.
Then we get to the third and final panel on the page. Wesker is getting stabbed through the back (which isn't accurate since he was stabbed in the chest in the game) and for some reason, everything he's wearing here is colored teal, rather than the dark blue and black that it's supposed to be. Also, the Tyrant looks a lot bigger than it's supposed to be in this shot.
We move to page twenty-six, which is a full-page spread of Chris firing... Something at the oversized Tyrant. I know it was pretty big in the game, but it wasn't this big. Plus, judging by how its torso pinches in towards the center, its lower body is completely out of proportion with the rest of it! Not to mention the fact that its skin is entirely black, when the T-002 Tyrant in the game was grey.
Then we get to the... Thing Chris is firing. He doesn't look like he's holding any of the guns from the game. The narration captions imply that Chris is firing a .10 Gauge shotgun into it, but he looks like he's just holding an oversized pistol, or possible a tube of toothpaste. Also, there's an arc of what appear to be muzzle-flashes across the lower-right of the page, but only the one centered on the barrel of the not-gun is actually aiming at the Tyrant. Both of the others seem to be poised to hit the walls and floor.
Also, the whole room has a red filter over it, as well as the Tyrant. I know it's supposed to be a warning-light, but looking back at my playthrough of the original game, the room the Tyrant was in wasn't flooded with red light. It wasn't even like that in the remake. It's a shame that they're only mentioning Chris as the one who beat the Tyrant. I know he's the teams sharpshooter, but it's not like the rest of the team weren't capable of fighting it. If they were combining the two stories, they should have shown all four members of the team fighting it.
Moving on to page twenty-seven, we see on the first panel Rebecca's face has been squashed, and for some reason, Jill's hair has turned blonde. Also, Jill's face isn't looking that good either.
The second panel is the first mention of Brad "Chickenheart" Vickers in the entire story. He's communicating with Chris over the radio from Marvel's Resident Evil comic (Again, why isn't it just the handi-talk from the game?) and telling him that he's coming in to extract them. Jill still looks blonde, and Brad's voice appears to be coming out of the microphone of the radio.
Chris grabs a flare from the box on the roof and fires one into the air to signal Brad. For some reason Barry isn't mentioned, nor does he make any appearances on this page.
On the next page (A full-page spread) the Tyrant (Which is finally colored properly, if not sized correctly) bursts through the helipad. The narration boxes say that Chris was tossed into the air, but the art just shows him resettling his footing. His shoulder-patch is golden now, and his left-hand is all wonky. Also, if you look at Jill closely, you can see that the waist of her pants extend out by several inches. And I don't mean like her ridiculous hourglass stomach from the cover, I mean it looks like the artist took a chunk out of her back. It could be rubble blocking the rest of her body, but the grey spot doesn't overlap with her pants at all, and we can see her shirt bunching up. It just looks weird. Then we look over at Rebecca and see that her neck is tiny.
Chris keeps rambling about the Tyrant being extremely dangerous and the ultimate soldier, blah blah blah.
Chris (And presumably the rest of the S.T.A.R.S. team, but they're neither mentioned, nor shown in this panel) unloads his ammo-stockpile into the Tyrant (Which is black again for some reason)
Chris mentions that the Tyrant took a few swipes at him, but he managed to get away. Chris mentioned on page twenty-six that one swipe of the Tyrant's claw could have taken him out. I know I wasn't playing the game on hard mode, but even then, Resident Evil protagonists can usually survive at least one hit from the final boss without dying. I just figured I'd bring this up since I feel like this is a contradiction.
Brad tosses a rocket-launcher down to Chris in the next panel, which leads me to wonder who's flying the helicopter, since it's not hovering at a level angle. The third panel on the page shows the rocket-launcher landing on the helipad near Chris. It looks like his wrist is broken is this page, and he's making a weird face. Chris picks up the rocket-launcher and blasts the Tyrant to pieces with it.
Looking at the fourth panel, Chris seems to have grown a massive jaw, and cracking out an action-movie oneliner. "Game Over"
Yeah, it's a funny line, but Chris was never supposed to be a wisecracking action-hero. That's Leon's job!
The fifth and sixth panels show Chris pulling the trigger on the launcher and the missiles launching.
The final panel on the page shows the Tyrant... Glowing? It looks like what happens when you defeat a monster in The Legend of Heroes: Trails In The Sky.
Page thirty shows Chris, Jill and Rebecca climbing into the chopper, which appears to have shut off its rotors. I know that otherwise we would barely be able to see them, since this is an overhead shot, but why couldn't it just be a side-view of the chopper? This makes it look like Brad landed the chopper, turned it off, and they waited for the blades to spin-down before getting in. Which doesn't make any sense, since they've apparently only got seconds until the mansion explodes, despite never mentioning that they or Wesker set the self-destruct sequence. Also, Barry is still not here, even though he shows up on the third panel of this page.
Also, there appear to be hiragana characters on the door to the chopper. It doesn't make any sense. I know this is based on a Japanese game, but A) They're American police, B) This is an American comic C) this chopper didn't have Japanese on it in the game to my knowledge, and D) This is supposed to be the S.T.A.R.S. emblem, which is both in English, and blue! This emblem is obviously white on black!
The next panel shows them flying away from the exploding mansion, and no signs of Barry running out of the mansion. Yet, as we've seen earlier in the story (And in the next panel) we see Barry Burton alive and well. Chris says that they were safely away when the mansion blew (Even though they supposedly only had seconds left) and that they lost too many good soldiers that day. Yeah, don't bring up the fact that your best friend who you'd known almost all your life was killed, just make a generic statement about all of the dead S.T.A.R.S. members. This is weird. I can't figure out at what point they established that Forest was Chris's best-friend, but what he says doesn't seem to be in-line with the exhaustion and pure despair that they were going through at the time. It seems like a rather soul-less thing for someone to say, especially since these people were friends of his. But, then again, it's hard to think of anything profound when you're grieving over the loss of your friends.
Moving onto the third and final panel on the page, for some reason, Rebecca knows that Barry was the only person other than Wesker who knew that Umbrella was controlling the mission. Perhaps some kind of reference to the first comic? They make so many.
Chris says (I think he's supposed to be asking, but he says it with an exclamation point instead of a question-mark) "How could you!" which doesn't make any sense. For one thing, Jill was the one who found out that Wesker was manipulating Barry, while Rebecca was holed-up in the mansion with Richard.
Question, why was Barry never brought up until now? They seem to have only adapted Chris's half of the game, which doesn't make any sense. Barry is never actually seen in Chris's story, and is presumed dead, even in the best ending of the game!
Likewise, Chris and Barry both survive in Jill's story, but Jill never actually met Rebecca in her story. So that raises the following questions:
One: Why is Barry saving Jill is never brought up? It's one of the most iconic moments in the game.
Two: Jill seems to be remembering a different version of events than Chris, so why isn't she bringing up her version of the story? It seems like it might be pretty good fuel for some kind of Silent Hill tie-in, or at the very least they could have brought it up.
Three: Why didn't they just make Rebecca the one in the cell? It would solve almost all of the problems with the story. Cut out Rebecca, put her in the cell and have Barry in her place until the final battle.
Also, the S.T.A.R.S. emblem on Barry's shoulder is white with a black circle in the center with what appears to be more Japanese lettering on it and little yellow dots instead of actual, you know, stars. I'd try to translate the text, but the resolution is so low I can't tell what symbol is which.
Chris then grabs Barry by the vest and begins yelling at him about betraying them. Even though, considering how the timeline of these events had to play out, he would have had to be present when Jill found out about what Wesker forced Barry to do. If you don't remember how it played out in the game, let's recap.
Wesker forced Barry to help him destroy evidence and manipulate the S.T.A.R.S. members that were still alive into staying away from places with evidence that connected Wesker to the events related to the mansion incident. Jill found out about this right outside the room with the Tyrant in it, and considering this seems to be some combo of the two possible stories in the game, Chris should have been present when that happened. Then again, the timeline in this story isn't exactly the most consistent. I'll give the games this, the story at least made sense. The first game might not be anywhere close to canon, but it was still fairly easy to piece the timeline of events together. At least I thought it was easy. In this, since they're telling a combined version of the story, you're left wondering which events happened in the story and which didn't.
Jill grabs Chris around the shoulders and tells Barry to fill the team in on what he told her.
Before we move on, I want to address the art on this panel. Chris looks pretty old in this panel, partially due to all the lines around his eyes, nose and mouth. He also looks way too angry for the amount of shock he should be in right now.
Jill looks fine, but then we move to Barry's shoulder, and we see that while the S.T.A.R.S. patch is essentially the right color, all of the letters have been replaced with wingdings and the stars in the center have been replaced by a Triforce. Also, for some reason, Barry's beard ends abruptly right next to his ear. I know it was like this in the original concept-art, but that doesn't make it any less strange.
Moving onto the second panel, we see that the yellow narration boxes have now become Barry's. Which doesn't make any sense, because Chris was using them earlier, and since Barry's vest is red, that's the color his boxes should be. Not that this story has ever made any sense with the coloring of their narration boxes.
On page thirty-one, Barry tells them that he knew Wesker was working for Umbrella, but he didn't know they were working on military experiments, as he (Like John Fay from the second story) was under the impression that Umbrella was conducting disease research. When he figured out that Wesker wasn't harmless, he was going to turn him in, but then Wesker threatened Barry's family.
Barry goes on to say that he was able to find some information on the G-Virus, despite Wesker's efficient covering of his tracks, and says that the G-Virus makes the T-infected stuff they fought before look tame by comparison.
He then goes on to say that the G-Virus is transmissible from host-to-host, rather than being airborne like the T-Virus was.
Moving onto page thirty-two, we see Chris pulling up a picture of William Birkin on one of the oversized monitors. For some reason, Birkin has a respirator on, even though he didn't wear one of those in Resident Evil 2, and he wasn't bald. Also, for some reason, Chris's S.T.A.R.S. patch is also showing a triforce now.
Chris mentions that they've received orders from headquarters telling Barry and Rebecca that they're being reassigned, and that he and Jill are supposed to report to the agency psychiatrist and await future orders. Naturally, Jill objects to this, and Chris says that they shouldn't sweat it, since they can use their downtime to investigate the European headquarters of the Umbrella Corporation.
Chris then goes on to say that their caseload is being shifted onto a single person who's driving into town right now. One Leon Scott Kennedy.
We'll get to this in a minute. Let's address the artwork on the pagee. In the first panel, Chris's hand looks a bit distended, and the text on his S.T.A.R.S. patch is just random squiggles, in addition to the "stars" being triangular.
Barry looks like Billy Blazes with a beard in this panel, and then we don't have much in the way of art problems that I can find until the third and fifth panels. In the third panel, Barry appears to be squinting, and his mustache looks more like someone stuck a rectangular piece of cardboard stuck to his upper lip.
Then on the fifth panel, Jill has inexplicably turned blonde again, and Chris and Jill are way too close in this panel for how they're posed. Perhaps the blonde hair is some kind of foreshadowing for her appearance in Resident Evil 5, or maybe the colorist just messed up. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that it's the latter.
The final panel on the page shows Leon driving into town. Hmm, what kind of vehicle is that? Why, it's a muscle-car!
Think back to the opening of Resident Evil 2. What kind of vehicle was Leon driving? Yeah, a Jeep. That's literally the first thing you see in the game!
We then move onto page thirty-three. The first panel shows Leon getting out of his car to shoot a zombie in his way. Notice how he's got an RCPD uniform on instead of a S.T.A.R.S. one, which directly contradicts what Chris said on the last page. Not to mention the fact that Leon was a rookie-cop who was coming into Raccoon City on his first day. That was literally something he mentioned in the beginning of the game, no matter which order you were playing the discs in!
Also, S.T.A.R.S. were supposed to have left town for a month or so by the time Leon and Claire arrived.
Speaking of Claire, she's riding into town right now too.
The art is decent upon first glance, but looking at Leon's jawline, his chin and jaw are both massive. And then we get to his gun, which is massive compared to the gun he had in Resident Evil 2. This pistol looks like it's supposed to be held by a Power Rangers action-figure from the '90s. This is especially strange, considering that, aside from his massive chin, he's actually pretty well-drawn. The rest of the art on this page is fine. Chris sitting at the table thinking about his sister, and Claire is riding into Raccoon City on her motorcycle.
So, this concludes the third story in the magazine. Honestly, it's not as good as the other two. There are constant issues with the timeline of events, the artwork shifts from really good to really crappy from page-to-page, and the overall story doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Also, most of the blood and gore is intestine related. Just... Why?
Then there's the fact that they spent fifteen pages telling us everything that happened in the game and setting us up for the Resident Evil 2 adaptation instead of spending it actually adapting the story of the first game in a coherent manner.
All in all, due to the timeline issues, the pacing issues, the fact that it's entirely told in flashbacks instead of real-time, and the constant issues with the art bring the final score down to a 5.4* rating. I'll see you soon with the final story; "Raccoon City: R.I.P."!
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