Ringside #7

Ringside, Issue #7 progresses the three main stories, all of which revolve around CMW, a major-league professional wrestling promotion.  You have the old timers.  One's fallen on hard times, so another falls into organized crime to help him out, but he doesn't know that he's being scammed.  There's the young kids.  Reynolds is on his way up, working his way to the lower midcard, perhaps.  At least he has his foot in the door.  Finally, there are the promoters

I bought five or six comics last Wednesday, and this was the last one I read, but you know what?  I always read Ringside, and more importantly, I always buy it the day it comes out.  The dark, seedy underbelly of professional wrestling has always been laid bare: the Terry Garvin/Pat Patterson sexual harassment stories, Vince McMahon, Ted Turner, Bill Watts.  There've been a number of questionable characters in the wrestling world, and we've all heard about them in shoot interviews and tell-all autobiographies.

So where does Ringside come in?  One of the strengths of this title are the relationships between the characters.  In the on-stage world of professional wrestling, the characters are ten times as developed as the relationships between them because those relationships can be so fluid.  Ringside isn't like that.  Also, it steps away from the wrestling world on more than one front, moving into the drug world.  It'll be interesting to see how those two world collide.