Image United #1 – Review

By Robert Kirkman (writer) Erik Larsen, Rob Liefeld, Todd Mcfarlane, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri & Jim Valentino (artists)

The Story: Super-villains are attacking major cities around the world simultaneously, setting the greatest Image Comics heroes on a course that will bring them together for the first time in over a decade!  Youngblood.  Savage Dragon. Spawn.  Cyberforce.  Witchblade.  Fortress.  Shadowhawk.  They’re all here, each penciled by their individual superstar creators!

What’s Good: Kirkman does an admirable job here, but by admirable, I don’t necessarily mean good. What I mean is that it’s obvious that he tried his best.  The writer has a marked appreciation for these characters and this era of comic publishing and that affection gives this first issue a lot of positive energy. It’s fair to assume that Kirkman didn’t have an easy task before him on this project.  Trying to write a cohesive story and service the fact that he’s writing for six different artists and six different franchises is enough to bring any solid writer down, and though he does prove somewhat susceptible to that weakness, there still manages to be some fun to be had with his execution.

Now, no matter how good Kirkman’s plot is, what everyone really cares about with this comic book is the artwork.  While this is certainly not the first time the gimmick of different artists working on the same page has been done, this is certainly the first time such high-profile artists have done so.  That fact alone makes this worth checking out.  Well, provided you’re a fan of at least a few of these artists.  I was surprised that, overall, the mixture of six different styles never really distracted me much from the flow of the story.  An interesting experiment…

What’s Not So Good: Well, if you read between the lines of my “What’s Good” section above, you’ll notice that the best I could say about this comic book was that no one ruined it.  That obviously doesn’t mean that it’s very good.  Let me put it another way.  This comic book would have kicked my skinny little ass when I was in high school.  I would’ve eaten it up and come back for seconds.  Unfortunately, it is not 1992 and, also, I had a pretty shitty sense of what was good back in high school (Except for The Good Son.  I’m standing by The Good Son, you hear me?!).  I don’t even see this appealing to the kids of today as it’s very much of it’s time and most of these characters haven’t exactly been bank-breakers for a very long while.  This might have been a momentous occasion ten years ago, but now?  Too little , way too late.

To further cement my opinion here, let’s list a bunch of stuff within these pages that High School Joe would have overlooked, but Early 30’s Joe can’t help but groan at.  Spawn’s cape (Which is mammoth!  I mean, it’s, like, his whole costume.) disappearing between pages.  One second it’s there, the next, gone.  This is not okay.  How about an explosion knocking everyone off their feet, but the only character who’s literally knocked on her ass so that she can lie in a sexy pose is the hot chick wearing a metal bikini.  Hot?  Well, yes.  Okay?  Not really.  Everyone standing in exaggerated poses while they’re talking to each other and often screaming things through gritted teeth like, “We are all going to die!”, when the person they’re speaking to is, oh, six feet away.  Obnoxious and lazy?  Yep.  Okay?  Nope.  Sound effects spelled “GOOM!”  “Goom”?  “Goom”?  Is this the sound of a goat exploding?  I understand that boom can get old pretty quickly, but there’s obviously a reason it’s lasted so long, people. “Hey, that bomb’s about to go off!”  “GOOM!”  So not okay.

Conclusion: There’s an exchange around the midpoint of this issue between Badrock and the Savage Dragon that goes like this:  Badrock:  “This is going to ROCK!”  Savage Dragon: “Grow up,  already.”  Those two lines perfectly summarize everything to be said about this comic book.

Grade: D

-Joe Lopez

 

Proof #14 – Review

By Alex Grecian (story), Riley Rossmo (art), Adam Guzowski (colors)

John “Proof” Prufrock and his partner, Ginger Brown, are agents for the Lodge, a secret government organization that is tasked with the cryptozoological investigations of the creatures of myth and legend that exist in the world today. By the way, Proof is a sasquatch.

In this issue, part five of what is obviously a graphic novel tailored story, Proof and Savage Dragon (whose presence in this issue felt contrived and unnecessary) are in Illinois investigating the existence of thunderbirds, while his partner Ginger is searching for a missing golem named Joe, who has ventured off with a mysterious yeti named Mi-Chen Po.

In Grecian’s hands, Proof and Ginger are likable characters; there’s a sense of a Mulder and Scully dynamic to their relationship that has probably been enjoyable to longtime readers. However, I was disappointed to see how little they actually appeared in this issue.  I was also irritated with Grecian’s “Cryptoids” caption boxes of irrelevant trivia that stick out like sore thumbs. Furthermore, Rossmo’s art is very out of place here. His characters appear scratchy and unfinished, as they have no sense of life and look like little more than mannequins positioned on the page; leaving it to Grecian to convey the emotional arc through the dialogue alone.  I could picture Rossmo’s style on a title like Warren Ellis’s Fell, but here it’s simply painful to look at.

Proof seems to fall somewhere between comparable titles like The Perhapanauts and B.P.R.D, yet the latter two are so much more fun to read.  If Image is going to charge me a whopping $3.50 an issue for this, I need a more satisfying reading experience, and they did not deliver that here.

Grade: C-

-Tony Rakittke