Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics:

Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities and the Orm of Loch Ness – 2

Clone −1

Frankenstein Alive, Alive – 2

Mind the Gap −6

Revival −5

X-O Manowar – 7

Dark Horse Presents – 18

Captain America −1 Sketch Cover Variant (I’m gonna sketch on it)

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

”Danger Club” Issues 1-4 by Landry Q. Walker and Eric Jones

”Danger Club” is another new creator-owned comic from Image Comics. It’s one I wasn’t planning on buying when I first read about it but picked up the first issue anyway the week it came out. It’s actually a super-hero book which makes it a change of pace from all the other Image comics that I’ve been reading lately.

The reason I had no plans to pick up this comic was that the premise didn’t interest me at all. It takes place on a world where all the super-heroes left the Earth to go off and fight against some unknown menace. They are presumed dead and all that’s left of the super-hero community are the various teen side kicks who got left behind. It just sounded dumb to me but I’m glad I picked it up because it turns out that the book is quite smart.

There’s an overall tone to the book of despair and sadness. The teen side kicks have all lost their mentors and a menace from space might show up on Earth to wipe them out at any time. Plus in the first issue they have to take down one of their own who is exceptionally powerful and took over a city just because he could. The side kicks are lost kids trying to deal with being heroes in a world that defied their expectations. This comic has a lot more emotional content than I expected it to. I also like the technique of have each issues splash page resemble a Silver Age comic showing an adventure of a teen side kick with his or her mentor super-hero. The innocence of such a splash page contrasts nicely with the rest of the story.

The art is decent if not spectacular. It’s that cell shaded type of art that doesn’t really have blacks in it nor modeled color but lots of cut color. I’m not a fan of that look but the storytelling is good and it reads well. The storytelling and script are involving enough that I don’t even notice that the art isn’t to my taste. Sometimes just flipping through a comic doesn’t really let me know if I’m going to like it or not. It has to be read.

So if you’re an old folkie like me who flipped through this comic and wasn’t impressed by it at first glance I say to give it a read. It’s good super-hero stuff and just might surprise you too.