Broken Frontier

DC brings a fresh take on an established character, but is there really anything new about Breach?

The first new book day of 2005 brings in the first new on-going title from DC for the New Year, and with it comes a new character. Breach is supposed to be a new redesign of Captain Atom, (a character I am admittedly not very familiar with), pitched by former Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief, Bob Harras.

This extra-sized 40-page first issue introduces us to the title character Major Tim Zanetti, a US army officer who later becomes Breach. While performing his duties at a top-secret military facility one night during the testing of cross-dimensional research, using a highly overused comic book cliché, something goes horribly wrong and Tim is exposed to an explosion that gives him powers in which he must be trapped within a containment suit to ensure he touches no other living being.

I was a fan of Harras in his days at Marvel, particularly his work on the Avengers, so his name is what initially piqued my interest in the title. However, Mr. Harras is going to have an uphill battle with Breach; it’s going to be hard to see it finding a growing audience in today’s market. The biggest problem is that Harras offers the reader little that is new in this first issue, which actually reminds me of any one of the countless failed superhero comics of the 1980s. This is not a bad comic book, far from it, but there is nothing here we haven’t seen before. The story potential lies in the idea that this does not seem to be a comic about superhero antics and the monthly battle against the latest evil Rogue. Harras seems intent on taking a darker approach, focusing on the idea that Tom is not blessed with cool new powers, but rather is stripped from everything he loved, including his humanity.

The art was the real treat for me with this debut. Wonderfully rendered by Marcos Martin, the style is very reminiscent of Javier Pullido with a little Charlie Adlard thrown in. A retro feel with clean, crisp pencils, Martin and Harris provide a wonderful execution of pacing with the silent panels, each serving a sequential purpose rather than unnecessarily padding the story. This is part of the art form I feel is really lost in most of today’s mainstream comic books. However, I wish I had the same praise for the character design of Breach. An all white suit with a few splashes of read certainly isn’t the most enticing image for money-conscious readers to pick up a new book about a character they have never heard of before.

The debut of Breach is a pleasure to look at and has a story with heart and humanity at its core, which is certainly more than you can say about the average superhero comic, however, it has a plot we’ve seen a thousand times. This comic is not a gripping debut issue that hooks you, but it’s certainly far more entertaining than another new series about an already overexposed X-men character. Ultimately, though, it’s likely this comic will see the same short-lived fate as so many other new titles in this wait-for-the-trade market.

-Glen Siegal