Broken Frontier

If there’s one surprising fact about webcomics, it’s the lack of super-heroes. This isn’t to say there are no super-heroes in the medium – in fact, there are several major hits – but due to the often manga-influenced nature of webcomics, someone in brightly colored tights stands out a great deal more than on the physical comic book rack.

Shades, by David A.J. Berner and Harsho Mohan Chattoraj, is Look Back In Anger for British superheroes, give or take twenty or forty years. After World War II, Britain’s superpower status faded, and with it, many superheroes on the other side of the Atlantic also became obscure.

After a riveting robbery at the British Museum, Shades opens up on, of all things, an aged tailor who made “exceptional clothing for some extraordinary people.” Kidnapped off the street and interrogated by menacing masked men of a different kind, Stanley Miller is drawn into a sinister conspiracy and must reunite with his former clients to find answers.

Though the narration can be a bit wordy at times, Berner shows great pacing in the execution of scene after scene. Combine this with compelling and atypical protagonists left and right, and Shades becomes extremely hard to put down no matter where you’re reading it. A long-winded execution is usually the death of certain webcomics, as their creators post pages straight from comic book form with little translation to the online medium.

Usually, webcomics require a hook at the end to keep their readers coming back for more. Berner doesn’t include a hook in each page per se, but there’s something to his swift prose and fast pace which make the pages fly by right before my eyes.

This isn’t to say Shades is without its flaws, and the biggest by far is navigation. Located on the main page of Broken Voice Comics, Shades is a bit hard to find at first, since the webcomic really doesn’t have a full-fledged sister site of its own. Worst, there is no actual navigation on the webcomic itself. You can advance forward by clicking the current page, but the only Back button is the one on your browser. There is a character page, but it contains sparse information geared more at fans than newcomers.

Overall, Shades is a bloody good read, and the navigation issues melt away as soon as the story begins to take hold. Still, I have a feeling these issues are really preventing the book from advancing further up the Top Webcomics page. With kinetic artistic appeal and powerfully-written characters, Shades is one of the most underrated super-hero reads on the net today.

In other news, Comixtalk.com reports Narbonic creator webcomic celebrity Shaenon K. Garrity will be releasing a new daily webcomic soon.