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If you read my review for Silent Dragon #1, you will remember the not so rave review of it. Near the end I hoped that the story would pick up in the subsequent issues. Well, it did. Silent Dragon #2 is a much more compelling chapter to the story than the first one was. The dialogue is more driving, and Gerry Alanguilan’s ink-work is fantastic! Not to mention Leinil Yu’s consistently good pencil and design work.

In this chapter, we meet Renjiro after the tragic events of the last issue. He is in a peaceful, floating garden and is joined by Ikiryo. Renjiro is told that he is in fact dead, but in more of a living-death. Ikiryo tells Renjiro that he wants to use him against Renjiro’s former boss, Lord Hideaki. After a short altercation, Renjiro throws himself off the floating garden, preferring a real, honorable death, than the living-death he is experiencing, and wakes up in his new body, half-constructed.

Renjiro, upon seeing his disfigured, horrific state attacks Ikiryo and finds him to be nothing more than a hologram being projected into Renjiro’s visual cortex. Ikiryo then gives Renjiro a new identity, that of a scoundrel arms-dealer named Reizo, and gives him the task of re-infiltrating Lord Hideaki’s operation. As a reward, Ikiryo promises to give Renjiro back his old body and identity.

At this point we cut to Gojira, the one responsible for Renjiro’s death, as he and a small entourage get ready to meet an extra-legal shipment at a local dock. They are met by the one element that knocks the point off my rating for this book, and that would be Suki Suzuki, formerly of the Super-Sexy Razor-Happy Girls. At this point I released a heavy sigh of disappointment. How cliche can one get than a hot and hip, smack-talking, tough-as-nails, street-gang chick that “was too crazy” for her former gang. Mr. Diggle, I know you are much, much, much better than this.

Adam Strange (DC) was fantastic from first page to last, and The Losers (Vertigo) is even more wonderful, with nary a cliché in site. Why give in to clichés all of a sudden? Final verdict for Silent Dragon is still rather high, given the bulk of the story. I just hope that Suki Suzuki of the Super-Crappy Cliché-Happy Annoying Girls does not appear as more than a supporting character in the rest of the series.