Halcyon #2 – Review

By: Marc Guggenheim & Tara Butters (writers), Ryan Bodenheim (art), Mark Englert (colors), Dave Sharpe (letters) & Aubrey Sitterson (editor)

The Story: The heroes of Earth continue to adjust to a world without crime.

What’s Good: The premise is interesting: What happens if there is no more crime?  What do the heroes do?  In this well written comic we start to see that the heroes are going to varied responses.  For example, the superfast dude is stressed to within an inch of his life because he (and he alone) is fast enough to get to the scene of natural disasters as they happen whereas the woman who is the Superman-analog knows she isn’t fast enough to do that stuff…and is really kinda enjoying relaxing.  They’re all different, and some will be not so noble.

The writing craft of this comic is really top notch.  It is well paced and the story is told in a way that makes it clear that the creators know what the story is going to be .  We’ve all read comics where you get a sense that the creators have a general sense of what will happen, but not a firm outline.  Not the case here and that is something I generally find to be true of writing teams since the mere act of collaboration requires more detailed planning.

We also don’t often get to say something nice about lettering, but Dave Sharpe is showing why lettering can matter as he does some neat things in this issue.  There is one character who is named Null and he doesn’t speak with typical word balloons, he speaks with black background/white text dialog boxes.  It may not seem like much, but it adds to this Null’s character without the writers having to write anything about him.

Finally, let’s cheer for the second issue coming out promptly.  I think a lot of “indy” comics lose momentum with bad release schedules.  My biggest complaint with issue #1 was that it didn’t give much intro, but that is kinda washed away now because issue #2 came out quickly.