Velvet #1 – Review

by Ed Brubaker (Writer), Steve Epting (Artist), Elizabeth Breitweiser (Colorist)

The Story: One of the top agents of Arc-7 gets killed during a mission. Thankfully, Velvet Templeton is on the case…

The Review: There are a lot of reasons to love Image comics right now. With so many high-profile creators making the jump to non-superhero work with their own characters and concepts, it’s a pretty great thing to behold. With Brian K. Vaughan on Saga, Matt Fraction on Sex Criminals and Satellite Sam, Greg Rucka on Lazarus and so on, it’s like a golden age of creator-owned comics.

Ed Brubaker, while already on track with his own Fatale, is getting even further along as he releases another one this week with Velvet. With his first Image series playing a bit with noir along with horror, this one deals with another type of stories that Brubaker is at ease with: espionage. With Steve Epting, his Captain America collaborator who brought Bucky back to life with Brubaker working with him, this seems like a dream come true for those who grew to appreciate the writers through the Winter Soldier storyline. However, do these two bring out the same amount of quality in this issue as they did in past comics?

Thankfully, they do, as this first issue show a great amount of confidence in both the style and world-building brought forth by Brubaker and the art of Epting. Already setting a conflict right in the very beginning of the issue as well as the tone, Brubaker does not lose a single moment in his script to get most of the series rolling. Doing this, he provides a basis for the characters and a world for them to develop in. It may not be the most original of settings, yet there are a lot of ways in which this first issue does its job really well.