Broken Frontier

One of the overlooked points of interest in Watchmen is the existence of comic books outside of super-heroes. The relationship caused an interesting amount of push-pull between the gritty real world heroes of Alan Moore’s classic and the Golden Age four-color pages which inspired them.

Writer Al Schroeder uses a similar tactic in everything from the marketing to the content in his super-hero webcomic Flickerflame. The results are peppered with references from everything from the Rolling Stones to the X-Men, leading to an equally engaging masterpiece, despite a few flaws. No stranger to comics, Schroeder’s roguish protagonist Lafferty (aka Flickerflame) was born for the webcomics, and Schroeder executes the character’s charm with ease.

Lafferty’s powers are pretty interesting in and of themselves – he’s a shapeshifter limited by the laws of conservation of energy, allowing him to transform into anything from two eighty-pound wolves to twenty eight-pound falcons. Schroeder clearly put a lot of thought into every page and every panel, and it shows, with crisp narration and an over-riding sense of clarity rare in most thoughtful super-hero comics.

The main plot follows Lafferty as he joins the superhero team Next Level with the sole purpose of bringing them down. But Flickerflame isn’t exactly the Terra to Next Level’s Teen Titans, as the team’s leader Lore is fraught with sinister intentions, ranging from political espionage to possible terrorism and even preparing the world for alien conquest instead of thwarting it.

The webcomic’s art is decent, and though loose and unbalanced in spots, it matches the fluidity of Lafferty’s abilities as well as his mysterious alien abductors. The biggest problem is the navigation, which is somehow saddled with embarrassing load times between pages. I’m not sure why this is, but both my home and work computer have taken a considerably long time to load this webcomic. This is a barrier which prevents readers from enjoying Flickerflame, which is definitely a shame, because there is a lot to enjoy here.

Despite the navigation problems and the art style, Flickerflame is probably the best super-hero webcomic I’ve seen so far (though admittedly I haven’t seen many). It’s smartly-written and paced with the best of the webcomics which reside at the top of Top Webcomics. With a little luck, Flickerflame might go on to be among the hottest webcomics out there.