Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors #2 – Review

By: Mark Andrew Smith (writer), Armand Villavert (art), Carlos Carrasco & Andre Poulain (colors) & Thomas Mauer (letters)

The Story: Young super-villains continue their training, but the battle they are preparing for is not what it seems!

What’s Good: This comic is just all kinds of fresh.  Because of the art (both linework and colors), these 10-year-old super-villains don’t come off as brooding proto-monsters, but as rascally kids…and that makes all the difference in how this comic is perceived.  Even if they are kinda on the bad-guys side, they’re just so darn earnest and cute!  They attack their school lessons with gusto: taking down summoned sparring partners in the gym or mixing up monsters in a Hogwarts-style potions class.  And when they gather around the live TV coverage of a superhero vs. super villain battle, you’d think they were kids watching a WWE Pay Per View.

So much of this comic is just watching kids having fun and being larger than life.  Only the most black-hearted among us can fail to enjoy that!

What’s ironic about the enthusiasm for their studies that the young villains is that while the kids think they are being prepped to join the larger hero vs. villain battle… The events outside the school are not what they seem.  That will clearly be one of the central stories for the early parts of this series.

As mentioned above, the art really makes this comic.  Flat(ish) colors just kick all kinds of ass and it’s this type of coloring that makes this comic leap out at you from across the room.  And most of the colors are just bright and powerful reds, greens, yellows, etc.  Mix this together with very impish art and you’ve got a very fun book that is quite visually distinctive.

Kill All Parents #1 – Review

By Mark Andrew Smith, (Writer) Marcelo Di Chiara, (Artist) and Russ Lowery (Colorist)

The premise of Kill All Parents lead me to give this book a try. A brilliant scientist comes up with a plan to ensure that the superpower population responsibly develops by killing the parents of all those born with superpowers. As soon as the parents are killed the children are trained and manipulated according to this scientist’s grand plan for the “greater good.” It is a dark and compelling concept that could hold a lot of potential. But does it get off on the right foot with this first issue?

Kill All Parents sets things off in a promising direction at first, but quickly suffers due to uninteresting characters, weird shifts in tone, and some decidedly average writing and artwork. Most of the characters introduced are obvious nods to famous heroes and, while it is somewhat fun to draw the parallels, they are just too much like the heroes we already know and love. None of the characters have any particularly distinguishing features and the comic world is filled with enough rip-offs as it is. There is a character like The Flash, one like Robin, a Superman… you get the point. The writer and artist clearly have a thing for the DC universe.

This book is, as a whole, incredibly bleak. Parents are murdered, heroes visit the graves, and the grand plan of the scientist is quite disturbing. That is why it is confusing to see “what if?” scenarios that attempt to be funny. While it did break some of the tension that had been building, it seems as though the “what if” scenarios were treated as punch-lines as opposed to a confrontation with the possible truth. The presentation eliminated any emotional impact.

If you haven’t drawn this conclusion by now, the writing in Kill All Parents is uneven at best. The concept is great and the play on the “superheroes born of tragedy” comic staple actually works. The problem is that it is clear the writer could not decide what type of tone should be taken with a story like this. Mark Andrew Smith builds tension and some emotional investment only to squander it through some unnecessary attempts at humor that belong in another story. I can see what he is trying to do, honestly, it just doesn’t work within this story.

The artwork of is really quite generic. There is nothing that makes this book stand out visually and, while it doesn’t look bad, it simply does little worth mentioning. On the other hand, I get the feeling that Marcelo Di Chiara had little to work with beyond the generic character templates presented here. The one positive in this book is some nice coloring by Russ Lowery that adds some dramatic weight to the darker aspects of this story.

Kill All Parents is a book with a great concept and because of that I can’t consider this first issue to be a total failure. Still, this debut is truly a missed opportunity. After one issue this series already facing an uphill battle and that is never a good thing. (Grade: D)

-Kyle Posluszny