Broken Frontier

Berserker #0 is a hyper-violent offering from Top Cow Comics produced by Milo Ventimiglia of television (Heroes) fame.

With only 8 pages of comic story to go on, the most interesting element of Berserker isn't even touched upon. Through a roundtable interview with the creators, we learn that Norse mythology will have a place in the back-story. Hopefully, this mythological angle will flesh out what is seemingly a blood splatterfest.

Farris, a soldier in the Afghanistan war, is put under hypnosis as treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is through this trope that we are treated to his transformation into a hulking, rampaging, indeed berserk killing machine, rending limbs and heads from friends and foes alike. It is gory to the extreme, with Saw-like in your face blood and guts. If Farris is to be the protagonist of the series, it’s going to be difficult to sympathize with him after his gory decapitation of his fellow soldier. He seems mild-mannered enough, and is of "Viking" ancestry with the last name Jorn. After being captured by the enemy, it is the pain of being tortured that sends him into his berserker rage.

Jeremy Haun's artwork is well crafted, with a good eye for detail in clothing and backgrounds. He excels at drawing gore, as more than half of the preview pages attest. I found it ironic that Dale Keown was tapped to draw the cover, given his past with Incredible Hulk, no doubt a strong influence on this premise.

In all fairness, there wasn't enough in this preview to assess the strength of the story and characters. I am sure that fans of extreme violence ala The Boys will find their appetites sufficiently whet by this gory interlude. Viking history and mythology is more my interest, so I hope issue #1 delves a little more deeply into the reason for this sudden appearance of berserker transformations in modern day Norse-descended soldiers.