Preview Day: Part One

First, let’s look at a couple of upcoming Dark Horse titles in the Doomkopf Mega Event Preview Day!!! Hey, who doesn’t like hearing about comic books that haven’t come out yet? These books share a common thread in that they’re both set in over-the-top worlds and… well… that’s about it. Now, let’s get to the books.

Up first is Umbrella Academy #1, a much-advertised new series from DH that features a septuplet of weird little kids with weird little powers. I hate to use the comparison since it’s a Dark Horse book, but Gabriel Ba’s art has the angularity and cleanness of Mike Mignola’s work, though it’s much more cartoony.

There’s an awful lot to like in this book, but its best quality is the absurdist whimsy with which the plot floats along. The tongue-in-cheek intro, in which professional wrestler “Tusslin” Tom Gurney knocks out a space-squid from Rigel X-9 and somehow causes the spontaneous births of powered children across the globe establishes this universe as somewhere along the lines of Hellboy and The Goon, but with a more childish air. Color me surprised, since the writing is done by Gerard Way, who apparently is with whine-glam-rock band My Chemical Romance.

From there, the book jumps forward a few years. An alien who poses as an old man has adopted the seven known powered children and has created the Umbrella Academy, essentially a super-powered team that fights goofy villains, like the zombie robot Gustave Eiffel who has taken control of his tower. It’s rampantly silly, yet maintains enough of a serious undernote to become more than simply fluff. Particularly, the presence of a non-powered child tempers the story.

That melancholic side comes to the fore as the book jumps forward again in the last pages, to when the children are grown and have become somewhat disillusioned (or at least so it appears). The constant paradigm-shifting and the layering of dozens of quirky little notes throughout the book (the warning of a threat from space, a time-traveling child, the possibility of other powered children) all leave me very interested to see what’s to come. I just hope the book maintains a toehold on the ludicrous. We have enough serious books nowadays.

Now, onto book numero dos, which is DH’s Zero Killer. This one takes place in a wasteland, in which atomic war (what else?) has left cities as flooded ruins. The book actually takes place in NYC in 2007, and the Twin Towers still stand, so I guess it’s more “What if?” than futuristic.

The story starts with some random girl running from a pack of assholes (not literally) who seem keen on beating and raping her. Because, you know, that’s what guys do in the future. She’s saved by some black dude who knows karate and has a mysterious background. He gathers up the gangmembers and hauls them back (with the girl’s help) to the penthouse of the queen of this gang. Matt Camp’s art, by the way, is perfectly fine if not overly imaginative. The ruined cityscapes are pretty neatly rendered.

The second half of the book is mostly a bunch of cutesy panels of said queen with her hair falling just the right way to obscure her nipples. Because, you know, in the atomic wasteland nobody covers their boobies. Alas, our common decency… The book ends with some hints that black karate dude had a brother and some badness happened.

Does it sound like I didn’t enjoy this book? Well, I hate to say it, but this just isn’t very good. Arvid Nelson’s story gives nothing to implicate anything very interesting is going to happen. It relies on the setting to instill importance. But we’ve seen post-apocalyptic material so many times before that it takes a good story to keep the train chugging. In this case, it seems like nothing more than a flimsy excuse to draw a hot naked chick a couple dozen times.

If you want post-apocalyptic New York, go for the vastly superior DMZ.