Thursday, August 18, 2016

Drafted: Free Comic Book Day Edition

From the random stack of unread comics and that massive FCBD haul we got in '08.

Title: Drafted: Free Comic Book Day Edition
Date: May, 2008
Publisher: Devils Due Publishing
Writer: Mark Powers
Artist: Chris Lie, Mike O'Sullivan, John Lowe, Joseph Baker, Wes Dzioba
Letterer: Brian J. Crowley
Cover Art: Mike O'Sullivan

This Free Comic Book Day special was essentially a recap of DDP's Drafted series, issues 0-5. It's cobbled together from those five issues with a "voiceover" in caption form.

The story is about Earth's first encounter with an advanced alien civilization, who has arrived to draft the whole human population into war with another alien species, a race of sentient world-eating worms. The incentive for humanity is pretty straightforward: The World-Eaters have Earth as their next target.

This looked like a really interesting idea. The aliens are desperate in their own way, in spite of their advanced technology, and there are a lot of plot twists as humanity gears up for all-out war.

The execution of this sample book could have been better, however, as the narration got wordy, and all of the cuts in the story disrupted the flow of the narrative and failed to give much sense of the characters.

I was also left wondering why exactly these aliens need humans in their battle. Hopefully that is explained in the full series, but it still felt like something of a gaping hole in this glimpse of the story.

And finally, the villains left a lot to be desired. They felt generic, and not sufficiently threatening, especially compared to the abilities of the "good" aliens.

Rating: 5/10

No comments:

Post a Comment