More than any of Spotlight's other scripters, Mike Tipton does a slick job recalling the snaky legal world that was such an indispensable part of the teleseries. It's a world where duplicitous shysters send their opponents a "blood subpoena," a spell designed to kill the lead opposing lawyer on a hopeless case so they can drag it out and get a continuance. "Why do you think there's never anyone manning the front reception desk?" vampire gal Friday Harmony notes, forcing this reader to try and recall whether he ever saw a front reception desk on the old TV show.
The three remaining entries - "Gunn" (Dan Jolley & Mark Pennington), "Doyle" (Jeff Mariotte & David Messina), and "Connor" (Jay Faerber & Bob Gill) - prove less memorable, in part because the characters themselves give the writers less to work with. (For many Angel fans, myself included, the petulantly adolescent Connor is an irritation more than an engaging character.) Even Jolley, who's demonstrated an engaging ability to make second-stringers amusing in the Marvel Universe, seems at a loss with Gunn, the urban monster slayer, while Mariotte, who scripted the first two Angel GNs, does even less with a character who couldn't even make it to the end of the series' first season. If this collection was a "giant-sized" floppy comics anthology, all three of these pieces would be much shorter back-up features.
Spotlight's five artists are generally up to the task of efficiently delivering the storytelling goods, though Pennington comes perilously close toward injecting his own visual personality into the proceedings. Perhaps the only minor character to not fare well in these tales is airhead vampiress Harmony, barely recognizable in her two small cameos. The most consistently expressive character renderings, to these eyes, come from Mike Norton's depiction of a tight-lipped Wesley.
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