Zero #1, by Marc Alan Fishman – Snarky Synopsis | @MDWorld

September 29, 2013 Marc Fishman 0 Comments

Story by Ales Kot. Art by Michael Walsh and Jordie Bellaire

I have ladled more compliment soup into Image’s bowl than any other company in recent memory. Thanks to the strength of the boundary pushing ‘Revival’, ‘Clone’, and ‘Nowhere Men’ (not to mention ‘Saga’ which apparently is written by Odin, drawn by Hera, and printed by Hephaestus on the Papyrus of the Gods) for a good long while, I was under the impression that the once Wildstorm-heavy publisher could do no wrong. While I won’t go so far as to say “Zero” is necessarily terrible… it is pretty bland affair. In fact, I’m taken aback at its banality.

The biggest issue here is that Kot’s core concept is presented as novel, when it is in fact old-hat. Rather than waste my snark pitching it to you, I’ll take it verbatim from Image’s marketing department:

“Edward Zero is the perfect execution machine – a spy who breaks the rules to get things done. When a stolen device appears in the center of a long-running conflict, Zero comes to retrieve it. The problem is, the device is inside a living, breathing, bio-modified terrorist and there’s an entire army after it.”

 

The issue itself starts with cliché number 407 in the writer’s handbook; with the grizzled veteran at death’s door, ready to recount his tale before biting a bullet. Maybe because I’ve used this exact same trope in a story of my own, but I read this first page, and immediately stifled a gigantic yawn. What proceeded for the next 30 or so pages was a by-the-book modern war comic, peppered with a teeny bit of sci-fi tech. Add in some unnecessary nudity in the middle third of the book, and douse the whole thing in blood and bullets, and you pretty much can guess every beat of the story pages in advance. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and Kot’s dialogue puts no spin on it to boot. Zero himself is just a jaw-clenching, friendly-firing super-spy who presents himself as ‘the man on the mission’. He’ll do whatever it takes. OOoooh! Does that mean he’ll kill good guys and bad guys in order to secure his target? You betcha! And what a contemporary and unique concept that terrorists would want super technology to breed super soldiers! You’d swear the book was written by at least 7 other guys in 17 other books in the last 27 years. Perhaps the first time we had a techno-soldier story in comics it was novel. Here, it’s the same as it ever was; Meep. Morp. Bleep. Boom. Pow. Grr.

Compare this say to ‘Six-Gun Gorilla’  from a month or so ago. There was another sci-fi war book, that knew how to keep things weird. While ‘Zero’ clearly aims for way more realism on the page… it does at the cost of my own interest. Perhaps to someone who loves playing ‘Call of Duty’ the book will resonate more. For me? It was milquetoast concepts joined with a bit of blood and bullets in an effort to make things splashy. Sorry kiddos, I’ll take the Gorilla any day.

Art wise, Walsh and Bellaire deliver a simplistic, moody book that suits the script just fine. Given my distaste for the scripting however, you might say that the art did little to elevate anything for me. Figures are stiff, mostly, and inked sloppily. The book simply looks like something drawn quickly, and cleaned up on the computer in order to make deadline. Backgrounds and textures and sparse at best. Inking is thick, and rough around the edges. Colors are flat, simple, and graphic. If it is the only thing to visually celebrate in the issue, it’s the tone choice throughout. From the cool and noir-esque late-night lab boinking session in London, to the sun-soaked war zone in the rest of the issue… color plays a bigger character that the titular super-soldier.

Ultimately ‘Zero’ can’t escape the much-better-brethren sitting on the shelf. The art isn’t spectacular or quirky enough to garner praise. The scripting makes no attempt at a passible hook for what adds up to a paint-by-numbers war book that happens to be set in the future. No amount of blood or gore makes up for a yawn-worthy plot. A super-soldier hardened by the terrible atrocities he’s commanded to undertake has been done. And done. And done some more. While I’d hope that there’s an original hook to be had here, especially given the pedigree of recent Image books… there simply wasn’t enough reason in issue one to garner a look at issue two. Swing and a miss, Image. Swing, and a miss.