Soldier Zero #1 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Javier Pina (art), Alfred Rockefeller (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)

The Story: A handicapped U.S. Army veteran gains the powers of alien being who has fallen to Earth after being wounded in a cosmic battle.

What’s Good: The story is pretty serviceable and has promise.  This issue is entirely set-up as we meet Stewart, who is a wheelchair bound U.S. Army veteran and start to learn about his life as a recently handicapped guy.  All the predictable stuff is there and Cornell handles it quite well: Stewart’s desire to be treated normally, flash backs to his injury, problems with dating, girl’s finding him cute but wondering if his man-parts work, etc.

This is interspersed with snippets showing Soldier Zero engaged in a big cosmic battle.  Nothing is revealed about who Soldier Zero is or who he is fighting, but that will clearly become a major focus of the series.

Pina’s art serves the story well.  Boom! seems to encourage their artists to stay within the story because you never see attempts (even failed attempts) to create grand splash pages and Boom!’s devotion to story seems to be their differentiating factor (compared to Marvel/DC).  You never have any wonder what is going on in a panel because Pina has chosen some weird perspective or lighting source.  It’s just clear and straight forward comic art.

Irredeemable Special #1 – Advance Review

By: Mark Waid (writer), Paul Azaceta (art, Story A), Matthew Wilson (colors, Story A), Emma Rios (art, Story B), Alfred Rockefeller (colors, Story B), Howard Chaykin (art, Story C), Andrew Dalhouse (colors, Story C), Ed Dukeshire (letters)

This Irredeemable special serves as an anthology, made up of three three short stories from the Irredeemable Universe. All three of the shorts are enjoyable, and for my money, the first story (“Hornet”) is the real winner here.  Anyone who has been reading Irredeemable since the beginning remembers that first scene of the title where Plutonian fries one of his hero buddies along with the hero’s wife and young child.  It was a graphic and memorable scene that set the tone.  “Hornet” adds some extra color to that scene and makes it even more terrible that Plutonian killed the guy and his family.  What I find impressive is that Waid clearly has a lot of story already planned because I doubt this is the sort of short story he could have whipped up on the fly.