Harvest #1 – Quick Review

By: A.J. Lieberman (writer), Colin Lorimer (artist) and Brandon DeStefano (letters)

The Story: An organ-stealing ring seen from the eyes of a fallen surgeon.

Quick review: This was a very promising first issue.  It’s not something you’ll want to be buried with, but it is well worth checking out if you’re looking for something gritty and grimy.

In case you didn’t know…..organ harvesting is a serious, real-world problem than has its roots in an understandable problem: If your loved one or child needed an organ transplant to live, but was put on a 4 year wait-list, would you pay ~$50,000 to get a “no questions asked” organ in a third-world country???  It’s easy to get on your ethical high-horse and say you would never do such a thing…..until it’s your child who needs a kidney.  Many people do this every year and try to convince themselves that the kidney their child received came from a kid who died in a car accident and not a kid who was kidnapped and chopped up like a stolen car or who was sold by her own parents so that the rest of the family could eat.

Term Life – OGN Review

By: AJ Lieberman (writer), Nick Thornborrow (art), Brandon DeStefano (letters) & Jade Dodge (editor)

The Story: A criminal on the run from the Russian mob and dirty cops is forced to take his estranged daughter with him on the lam.

What’s Good: This is a very solid 144 page softcover OGN from Image.  If you enjoy crime stories, this is something you might want to check out.

The trick with any crime story is to give us a main character we can root for.  That isn’t always an easy thing when the main character is a criminal, but Lieberman has a pretty good concept to make Nick Barrow seem not quite so bad: Nick just plans the crimes and then sells the plans to other dudes to do the actual robbing, shooting and killing.  So, Nick’s hands are relatively clean and we can want good things for him.

As with many crime stories, the action revolves around a heist-gone-bad.  When the dust settles, the big Russian gangster’s son is dead and he thinks that Nick is responsible, and here is where the story deviates from the norm (which would be to show Nick somehow take down the mob) by showing Nick resigned to the fact that they’re going to kill him eventually, so he buys a huge life insurance policy with his estranged 13 year old daughter as the beneficiary.  The only trick is that it’ll take 21 days for the paperwork to be processed, so he has to stay one step ahead of the bad guys for 21 days and his daughter will be provided for.

But, the real highlight is the father – daughter story between Nick and a daughter that he barely knows.  This isn’t even really part of the “crime story” as the set-up is typical: divorced parents, teenage girl, mother hates father, father has barely seen daughter.  But the execution is quite good as the kid realizes that her dad isn’t quite the villain that mom made him out to be.  Even if you are a good parent, there is a lot to identify with in terms of staying close to your kids and not wanting a gulf like this to ever develop.

In terms of narrative structure, the action is mostly linear, but there are places where it bounces around in time a little bit, especially in the early phases of the story.  The end is much more linear.  And the scenes are very quick and choppy with most being only a page or two.   This gives the story a faster feel than it would ordinarily have.