Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics plus a hard cover collection:

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

”Epic Kill” issues 1-5 by Rafaele Ienco

I recently read that “Epic Kill” is going to become an ongoing series. These five issues are all one story and were supposed to be a mini-series. I guess it sold enough copies and Ienco wants to continue it. Good for him. I like to hear success stories in comics. Or at least pretty good stories. I have no idea what success in comics is these days.

I bought the first issue of this months ago just to try it out. It was okay but really didn’t grab me. It was actually Rafaele Ienco’s editorial in the back of the comic that made me interested. He was basically talking about flying by the seat of his pants with this story and seeing where it goes. I figured I’d hang into see where the story goes too.

”Epic Kill” is a revenge story. A small girl is in a car accident in which here parents die and the man who caused the accident doesn’t bother helping the parents and runs off instead. That man goes on to be a candidate running to be President of the U.S. While the little girl grows up training in martial arts to get revenge.

The comic is just about one long action sequence. Sure we get flashbacks explaining things and cutaways to the authorities trying to figure out what is going on but mostly it’s the woman fighting all sorts of police and military. She beats them all too. It would seem that she’d have to have some sort of super-power to win all those battles but I don’t think she actually does. It was all just training somehow. It reminded me of those Kung-Fu movies where people could do all sorts of super-feats because of special training.

Overall the story was okay. The art was solid and so was the story telling. I had a little trouble accepting the overall fantasy element of this small woman taking down person after person with little more than some martial arts training. But that has to do with me rather than the story. I also had a problem with us constantly being told how bad-ass the lead character was and how she could win every fight. That kinda took the drama out of things. But once again that happens in this type of genre story so me not liking it has more to do with my taste than the story.

In the end ”Epic Kill” to me was okay but not great. Fans of the martial arts revenge genre might like it better than I did. Give it a look if that’s your thing.