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.
|