The Intrepids #1 – Review

By: Kurtis J. Wiebe (writer), Scott Kowalchuk (illustrator), Justin Scott (colors) & Frank Zigarelli (letters)

The Story: A mechanical engineer genius takes in woebegone kids, uses his scientific acumen to give them powers and turns them into a super team to take down his mad scientists.

What’s Good: This is a promising new series from Image by Wiebe & Kowalchuk.  I’m not familiar with either creator and didn’t really know what to expect from this comic, but this first issue is light and fun with pretty good art.

One good thing is that the central characters are all teenage kids who seem pretty new at this super-power game.  Kids are great in comics because they can actually show personal growth on the timeframe of a story arc versus the decades it takes an established adult hero like Batman or Cyclops to change much.  The comic opens with a bang, showing the kids infiltrating some secret, evil scientist lair.  As a team, they have all the boxes checked: flying girl providing aerial support, big strong brawling guy, computer whiz & expert marksman/leader.  Later in the comic we learn that their mentor, Dante (who has a Professor X vibe to him), has been nurturing them to take out his former lab partner and nemesis who has taken to performing augmentations on animals.

The art is a definite highpoint.  The overall look and feel of the comic is very much like something we would have seen in The Bulletproof Coffin or Jack Staff both in terms of character design and the use of bright, mostly flat colors.  I also really enjoyed the layouts, especially a really cool scene where the leader has to gun down a charging robo-bear.  Its just really nice stuff and this looser cartoony style is so effective for these sorts of stories because the reader doesn’t spend time fixating on how someone’s nose looks funny or perhaps their mouth looks different than it did in the previous panel.

Proof Endangered #1 – Review

By: Alex Grecian (writer), Riley Rossmo (artist) & Frank Zigarelli (colors)

The Story: Bigfoot is back as Proof gets started again, picking up pretty much where it left off.

What’s Good: You don’t often get “jumping on points” with ongoing, creator-owned titles (i.e. Image, Vertigo, etc.).  One of the beauties of those types of comics is that they are telling a story rather than a series of adventures where nothing really changes (see: all Marvel & DC superhero comics).  That faithfulness to the story is the best and worst thing about such comic series: They are way more rewarding to read long term, but if you get left behind it is very hard to pick up in the middle and it can feel daunting to “catch up”.  So, it is a neat thing that the creators of Proof have given us this issue that really serves as a jumping on point for new readers.

“New reader” describes me pretty well for this series.  I was aware of the premise, have always enjoyed reading about cryptids and had read a few issues on Comixology, but was nowhere near “caught up”.  There was nothing in this issue that made me feel like I was being left out and the story did a nice job of laying out who all the characters are, what they’re up to while also continuing the ongoing Proof story (or at least seeming to) and laying out new story material.  That’s a lot of tasks accomplished for a single comic issue!

If you have read Proof or Cowboy Ninja Viking, you’ll be familiar with Rossmo’s art and it is on fine display here.  One of the things I really enjoy about his art is that you can see his pencil work in the finished product (lots of artists either erase all of the pencils OR clean it up digitally).  I’m not sure what his artistic process is like, but the end result is a pretty unique look and “unique looks” are part of the reason I enjoy non-Marvel/DC comics as much as I do.  Rossmo also shows in a few panels a great mastery of human anatomy that I really enjoy seeing (especially if you’re sick of seeing superheroes bulging with muscles that don’t really exist in nature).