Comics Reviews by Jamie Coville

United Free Worlds #1
Published by Fantasy Prone
Format: Full colour, 44 pages, heavy paper stock.
Cover Price: $2.99 US
Writer/Art Director: Blake Leibel
Artist: Jason Raines

The cover shows you military fighting men riding on dinosaurs with armor on them. The plot in a nutshell is a new planet suddenly appears right next to Earth. A world government forms and we start exploring and colonizing the planet. This takes place at some unspecified point in the future where we have much advanced technology. The new planet at first appears to be uninhabited, but we discover this is wrong when their war loving leader attack one of our settlements.

The opening page has headshots of the main characters but we only spend 5 pages and a few panels with the main character Barley Douglas, who we understand is a Chuck Norris type bad ass. We spend some time with people on the other planet, a couple of pages on a couple of secondary characters. The rest of the pages are on world building. There is much use of caption boxes to explain the world and the plot as it goes along. The dialogue is very to the point.

Much of the art involves very tiny figures and lots of panels per page, the most being 17 in 3 different pages, but 8-14 were common. There also appeared to be lots of photoshopping involved. Another problem was the inconsistency of the art, on some pages the details are sparse in certain areas (particularly on humans) in other areas they were hyper detailed (machines, animals, armor). Which was a shame, to see the artist spend that much time on a page and I doubt I looked at it for more than a couple of seconds upon first read.

There is a long tradition of comic fans liking detailed artwork, but too much itty bitty detail on uniformly small items just made my eyes glaze over it all. This made for very tedious reading. So much so I didn't really want to finish reading this book. I'd blame the artist but the writer did write all that stuff that had to go in there and is crediting himself as art director.

12 pages towards the back are profiles of characters on both sides and their weapons/gear. It reminds me of GI Joe profiles on the back of the toys that I bought when I was young. I wish they more effectively used the space they had in the book to tell the story better. The 12 profiles could have been either cut down to 2 a page and/or limited to a few of the main characters we actually see in the comic. Plus there are a couple of double splash pages that were not necessary to telling the main story.

Neither the plot or characters really hooked me. I can say the next issue shows some improvement but for this issue I'm giving it a 1 out of 5 stars.

 

United Free Worlds #2
Published by Fantasy Prone
Cover Price: $2.99 US
Format: Full colour, 48 pages, heavy paper stock.
Writer/Art Director: Blake Leibel
Artist: Patrick Blaine
Cover Artist: Steve Skroce

This issue is devoted to describing the history of Earth's foes in the New, nearby planet. It shows them fighting many different alien races and winning. This again leads to a lot of explaining in captions. As with last issue, the dialogue is to the point with little else involved. Towards the end, it clues us in on why their planet has suddenly appeared next to Earth and their reason for starting a war with Earth. If you've read comics for a while, the reason will be a familiar one.

There are 8 double splash pages and 1 single page splash. Thankfully the story pages are not as cramped as last issues. Most have 5 panels, those that have more are well laid out to give them space. Why the story is laid out this way when the writer has so much story to tell I still don't understand. What was in them was much more pleasant to the eye. Patrick Blaine is a good artist who's done some work for DC, Top Cow and other companies. It was much easier to read this issue.

I noticed there are 4 colourists on this book vs. 2 on the last one. The colouring did "pop" a lot more on this issue. There were two particular pages where they used the same idea twice, a dark page followed a bright Orange/Red page which hurts the eyes at first sight. I understand why they would want to use this effect (and seen it done before by Geof Darrow) but doing it twice in the same issue is a no-no. One of the colourists, Jason Aronson is also responsible for digital centrefolds, which would be some of the 2 page splashes.

After the story is what is described as rejected concept sequences, which looks like the previous artist's uncoloured pencil work. He did 6 pages, which were not splash pages either. In the back are some ads for Devil's Due books including one Blake Leibel is writing. The 3rd issue of the book (and beyond) appears to be co-published by both companies.

The change in artists and the better layouts improved the comic quite a bit. It still has some way to go before I'd consider it a good comic worth seeking out. Perhaps once the explaining is all done and we get to the modern day story it will improve. I give it 2.5 stars out of 5.

I also have issues 3-5 of this book I will be reviewing next month.

Regards,

Jamie Coville
http://www.TheGraphicNovels.com
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Text Copyright © 2009 Jamie Coville

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E-mail: jcoville@kingston.net