Broken Frontier

The battle for supremacy of Springwood continues to rage on as Freddy squares off against Jade and her father.

I was surprised to learn that WildStorm managed to snag the licensing rights to New Line Cinema’s horror properties. Now this included: Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and of course A Nightmare on Elm St. It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than twenty years since Freddy Krueger first stalked the movie screens across America, and now the good folks at WildStorm intend to continue the horrors on Elm Street.

This is being done in an all new series that brings the horrors of the Springwood slasher back to the stomping grounds he made famous all those years ago. But this time around, a new family moves into the neighborhood, and it doesn’t take long before Freddy is alerted to the presence of Jade and her brother. Last issue Freddy eliminated Brad and now this issue he intends to take Jade’s life as well, but finds a stumbling block in his way. Luckily enough, Jade’s dad is willing to go to great lengths to protect his daughter and for the first time ever Freddy has a serious challenger to prevent him from doing what he does best.

Now that you understand the dynamics surrounding this series, let me be the first to say that there’s nothing new going on here. I don’t think I am faulting writer Chuck Dixon for lack of originality, but this idea for a series continues to stem from the same old story clichés we’ve seen before. I would have preferred to see a different approach taken, and perhaps even a new twist or wrinkle introduced in the plotting would have helped to alleviate this standard formula.

The artwork gracing this issue was okay for the most part, but quite frankly I was expecting to get a bigger bang for my buck. Again I can’t fault artist Kevin West, since the story had very little action going for it, and this gave the artist very few highlights to work from. The only point during the story he was allowed to display his artistic chops came at the climax when Freddy appeared to challenge Jade during a dream sequence. I thought there were several panels that accented Freddy’s malevolent persona, but beyond that this one was rather dull for the most part.

In the end though, I think what is truly missing is the lack of an engaging enough plot. This just all adds up into one big bore and this story is obviously going through the motions for the most part. I think this is a shame because I was expecting more from the folks at WildStorm given Freddy’s potential to frighten the pants off folks, and sadly this series has none of that.