Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer(s): Tim Seeley
Artist(s): Jim Terry
Release Date: 29th October 2014

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A warning. Some people will not like this comic, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the 80s art is increasingly clever. I was wary of it in issue one, hardly registered it in issue 2, and love it by this issue. That’s not to say it isn’t contrived, it is. But this is a comic that depends absolutely on us, the audience, having a pretty robust knowledge of the genre, which is another reason some might find it off-putting. That’s not to say you need to know your 616 from MCU, or even the Dark Horse Universe, but you’ll get a whole lot more out of this comic if you’re a widely read fan of superhero comics, and superhero metafiction (Morrison, Moore et al) in particular.

But the central concern of this is brilliant: are they superheroes? Or are they just delusional? Or, quite possibly, both?

The narrative never lets the reader be absolutely certain, and that’s where this is so very successful. Tim Seeley loves to play on a reader’s preconceptions (vid. his work on ‘The Occultist’) and he does it here in spades. Dark Horse as a studio generally seems to have a better hand on this than anyone just now, and for those of us who’ve grown up reading the likes of Animal Man and Watchmen this is a real treat.

It’s a dark, savage, brilliant work. It’s up there as one of my absolute top picks just now, and you should buy it to find out just how clever a crime-fighting super comic can be.

Rating 5/5.

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The Writer of this piece was: Sam De Smith
You can follow Sam on Twitter

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