Image United #2

December 25, 2009

Image United #2 (Image Comics)
By Robert Kirkman, Erik Larsen, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri & Jim Valentino

After a lackluster first issue, I was willing to give this event series one more shot before calling it quits, and I think this is pretty much going to do it. We start things off with Jim Downing, the new Spawn, facing Al Simmons, the original Spawn. Al, apparently mad with power, has decided that he’s sick of being a pawn in the game between Heaven and Hell, and he’s going to just take control of the world himself. So far, so good, but after this we get drawn into another sequence of seemingly random attacks, with villains and other heroes from the six participating creators’ personal stables brought in to fill things out, all while Youngblood sits around and debates whether they should trust Fortress. It doesn’t really amount to much, and the conflicting art styles are far more noticable this month than they were before. Image has announced a spin-off one-shot that’s going to focus on Image heroes outside of the founders’ stable (Invincible, for example), and since I’m far more interested in those characters than the ones we see here, I may pick that up. But as far as the main series goes, I don’t know if I’ll have it in me to bother with issue three.
Rating: 4/10

Image United #1

November 28, 2009

Image United #1 (Image Comics)
By Robert Kirkman, Erik Larsen, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri & Jim Valentino

The long-awaited collaboration between the remaining six Image founders (or even all seven, if you got the Jim Lee variant cover) finally kicks off. The strange new hero, Fortress, is having visions of himself standing side-by-side with Youngblood, Spawn, Shadowhawk, Witchblade, Cyberforce, and the Savage Dragon, facing some terrible threat. As he tries to figure out what’s happening to him, Youngblood and the Dragon team up to face Spawn’s old sparring partner, Overt-Kill, on the streets of Chicago. To be honest, I wouldn’t have even considered getting this book if it weren’t scripted by Robert Kirkman, producer of most of Image’s best titles these days. Even with his stamp, this first issue was a disappointment. I expected things to be a bit cryptic, a bit of a puzzle as to why, exactly, all this disparate heroes are being drawn together, but the story in general and Fortress himself, as the narrator, are so cryptic that I quickly finding myself losing interest. It doesn’t help that, with the exception of Shadowhawk, none of these are characters I’ve ever had any deep affection for to begin with. On the plus side, the bizarre jam-style of the artwork actually succeeds pretty well. Each of the six creators is doing the artwork for their specific characters, meaning you can see up to all six of them working on one page if all the characters are there. The styles don’t clash as much as one would expect, and while you can certainly tell that the artists change frequently, it doesn’t really hurt the story. The trouble is, there isn’t really enough story here yet to be in danger. If that doesn’t change with issue #2, I doubt I’ll be back for issue #3.
Rating: 5/10

Somebody’s First Comic Book: Badrock Annual #1

Wondering what Somebody’s First Comic Book is all about? The explanation is on this page!

CREDITS:

Writers: Tom & Mary Bierbaum
Penciller: Todd Nauck
Inker: Jeanette Ubando
Colors: Scott Baumann
Color Separations: In Color
Letterer/Associate Editor: Kurt Hathaway
Editorial Assistant: Tom Reiter
Cover Artist: Arthur Adams
Publisher: Image Comics/Extreme Studios

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: None. Looks like this dude is made out of rock. And… um… he’s “Bad.”

IMPRESSIONS: The story begins in medias res (that means in the middle, for those of you who didn’t pay attention in English class) with the titular Badrock throwing down with some guy with the unlikely name “Re-Coil.” Apparently, the two of them have bounced away from a fight between Badrock’s team Youngblood and Re-Coil and his partner… :chuckle: coil. A second group of superheroes, Freak Force, hears about this on the news and rush out to help their hero, Badrock.

Well, sorta. As it turns out when they arrive, they’re really more bounty hunters than superheroes. And while they are fans of Badrock, they’re apparently not above poaching his collar to get the reward. Badrock gets into a pissing contest with the Freak Force tank, Barbaric, and the two of them decide to trade blows and settle their differences in an “abandoned” neighborhood. You can probably guess how that turns out.

This is, to be frank, a remarkably stupid story. The characters act childish and sophomoric, and the fact that one of the other characters recognizes this and points it out doesn’t really help the situation very much. Some of the characters pop up out of nowhere and have little or no development. In several cases, I don’t think their names are even mentioned at any point in the comic book (the blond dude in the Superman cape, for example).

But we have to be fair to the rules of this little experiment, and that means being honest. As mind-bogglingly stupid as these characters are, can I understand what’s happening? Yes. And with perfect clarity. I don’t exactly know who all the players are, but I know the main characters and the situation itself is presented cleanly, without really requiring massive amounts of backstory knowledge to get the drift. And on that basis, this comic scores relatively high.

GRADE: B