I thought I would start a monthly review column for the Collector Times on this the 14th anniversary of the online magazine. What to review though? I found that this year I am breaking out of my super hero shell of comics and branching out. Last month you may have read my review of Image Comics' Fatale so I figured that I would review something else that was getting a lot of good press, Prophet. I go into my local comic book store last month and look for it on their shelves. I find that they have a second print and grab a copy. Normally I like to have a first print of books like this in case something has happened that required the reprint, but looking on the internet later shows that this had a rather small first print run and that sold through rather quickly so there were no printing issues with the book. I'm kind of let down, but that does not deter me from reading this book.

The Cover

Let's judge a book by its cover. For some reason, the book starts at issue #21 instead of #1. I think this is because with my internet research I found that this is picking up where the title left off years ago. There's a bar at the top like Marvel used to have on their books in the 1970's and early 1980's that says "1st issue on a bold new era for EXTREME!" Okay, not winning me over so far. The last thing that I looked at with the term "Extreme" in it was "Extreme Championship Wrestling" back in the early 2000's. It has the title in orange and white characters and then we get to the meat of the cover. There's a guy on the cover in some sort of orange full body suit that looks like it is something out of a science fiction movie. He's leaning on some sort of creature that looks like he just killed because the wicked blade that he is holding has blood dripping from it and the creature has a giant bloody gash in its side. In the background we see rolling green hills with some sort of three legged alien looking over at what the man has done with a question mark bubble above its head. For some reason, there is a cube and a cone floating above the hills. This seems kind of odd, but as I have learned with a lot of comics, odd is the norm. Looking on the inside of the cover, there's the credits page. It lists the writer, artist and everyone else involved with the book and at the very bottom of the credits it says: Prophet created by Rob Liefeld. Great, I'm reading a Rob Liefeld book. Okay he's grown a lot as a comic book person in the past 20 years when he started Image Comics with everyone else, and I have grown a lot as a reader as well so I am going to keep an open mind about this. He only had a hand in creating the variant cover for the first print so I am just going to look past that for now and start reading.

The Book Itself

It opens with some sort of six legged creature grazing on the grass, then a rumbling starts behind it and then it scampers off when something that looks like a piece of mining equipment comes out of the ground. A door opens on the vehicle and a man falls out and promptly throws up a small metallic egg. A voice box tells us that the man's name is John Prophet Then we get a big panel shot of the area that he is in. It's rocky terrain with very little growing in the way of vegetation and mostly has weird ass animals like the six legged goat thing and something else that is in the big panel on the bottom right of it chasing a little white mouse.It opens with some sort of six legged creature grazing on the grass, then a rumbling starts behind it and then it scampers off when something that looks like a piece of mining equipment comes out of the ground. A door opens on the vehicle and a man falls out and promptly throws up a small metallic egg. A voice box tells us that the man's name is John Prophet Then we get a big panel shot of the area that he is in. It's rocky terrain with very little growing in the way of vegetation and mostly has weird ass animals like the six legged goat thing and something else that is in the big panel on the bottom right of it chasing a little white mouse. Over the next page, we see him kill something called a Tulnaka and and cook it over a make-shift fire. He guts the thing and finds a human hand that was bitten off at the wrist. Obviously, not Prophet's. There's a panel with an inventory of stuff that he's carrying with him. This seems pretty unique to use one panel on a third of a page to show us what he is carrying. I'm sure this has some reason to it, but I don't know what. We see him go down the cliff he was on through a forest where he fights something called a Domoeode Wolfpack. They look like normal wolves except they have some sort of parasites attached to them. The next morning he tries fishing and catches an uneatable fish from a river and then kills something that must be this place's equivalent to a squirrel and eats it. Coming to a clearing in the forest, he finds the rusted hulls of man made ships. He climbs up the hulls and looks down into the valley below. It appears to be some sort of civilization and then through comment boxes we read that it is an Oonaka meat farm. Looking in the other direction he notices some sort of plane or space ship headed towards something called the Jell City. He's having some sort of dream on the next page because he wakes up with a start with the comment boxes again saying that he's been having these dreams since he arrived at the city that we learn are telling him of his mission. The Jell city reminds me a lot of an ant colony with him walking among them. There's commentary boxes talking about the Jell caste system and their history on the planet. He stops in a lower level and the ground starts to shake and some sort of pod thing drills its way out of the ground. Prophet opens it up and finds some more things that will help him with his quest. Some sort of lower than low class of creature takes a shot at him with its weapon and one of the things that he found in the pod saves his life. He fights off these creatures and goes back to pod base and meets his contact. The contact is some sort of creature that we have not seen in any of his travels so far. It wants Prophet to mate with him first. It presses something and climbs out of its suit. It is at this point that we get some back story revealed to us. Not too much, just enough to whet our appetite. His mission is to head east to the Towers of Thauilu Vah, activate something called the G.O.D. Satellite and awaken the earth empire. The creature then cuts Prophet open as part of their mating ritual and removes something. On the last page we see that Prophet left the Jell city and is being observed by some men in what I can only describe as battle suits of high tech armor. Prophet is walking east into the sun and that is where this first issue ends. After a page of in house advertising, we are treated with a two page spread of a map that shows the areas that he just went through. There's no English text on the map so we are just left with pictures and what little we know to figure out what is going on with the map.

Overall Impressions

Writing: There was very little dialog in the book and that is normally one of the drivers of a story, but this was a more "show, don't tell" thing that really worked for me. Brandon Graham's writing did not bowl me over, but with this being the first issue you have to leave certain things up in the air to be resolved in later issues. There's one line of dialog spoken by the contact towards the end of the issue that some people might find rather nasty, but it does not seem inappropriate for where he is. Art: Well, it certainly sucks you into it with all these strange creatures in the environment around him and has you wondering where the heck you are. Sure it looks like earth, but is it really? Simon Roy is not what you would call a traditional comic book artist that people are used to today. His art is realistic enough for me, but I'm afraid that one of my art professors might call it a bit abstract. Mister Roy also did the cover to this second print so there's some continuity from cover art to interior art. This is also one of those situations where the cover does not lie to you. Colors and Letters: The colors by Richard Ballermann start off a bit on the odd side because it looks like everything was covered with a pinkish wash. That could be just the cliff he came up on because the light is reflecting off the ground, but everything else in the book is good and reflects an earth like world with green trees and bushes, brown or white rocks and the blue waters of the river he fishes in. The lettering by Ed Brisson is good work. None of the boxes that have information in them obstruct what is going on in the panels and that is fine work. They are small and compact and remind me of the ones that were in the Amazing Spider-Man books I used to get.

Final Thoughts

The book is a good start to a series that I had no intention of picking up. I sill might put it on my pull list when I rearrange a few things on it since I am going to be cutting back on what I get each month. I'm probably going to go to two issues of DC's "New 52" and get the rest as Image and Dark Horse titles. Marvel Comics is dead to me because of just the sheer amount of stuff that they have going on in their books with big events every year. You have to pick up virtually every Marvel title a week to keep up with everything going on. To me that is just insane. Look for something next month.

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Copyright © 2012 Mathew "thehammer" Bredfeldt About the Author