Broken Frontier

I remember the day I first learned Mark Waid’s name. I’d just been persuaded to part with an extra dime one Wednesday in exchange for Marvel’s ten or eleven cent issue of Fantastic Four, which they were doing as a publicity stunt to attract readers for the start of a new run written by this guy Waid (whoever that was).

I clearly recall squealing with delight when I discovered that this was the best loose change I’d ever spent on a comic book. I never gave the Fantastic Four so much as a second thought prior to picking up that comic, but the writing was so sharp and the plotting so good that things with Mark Waid’s name kept ending up in my stack.

Flash forward to City of Heroes. If you’ve never heard of it, City of Heroes is a videogame, a massively multiplayer online game in which you the player create your superhero and then log into an online world where you can fight evil with heroes other people made. That’s pretty much the whole game, but since it’s subscription-based, imagine that fighting evil, getting new powers, and unlocking new costumes takes a very long time.

Since its launch, City of Heroes has sent its subscribers a comic book every month in the mail based on the game. That comic was never worth devoting much print to. But now Top Cow and Mark Waid were taking it over, so I was curious enough to give it a look.

The chief problem facing anyone wanting to do a City of Heroes comic is twofold. First of all, it probably has limited appeal for people who aren’t part of the game. Secondly, people who are part of the game mostly wouldn’t care about the adventures of NCSoft-created characters like Statesman, Positron, and Sister Psyche inhabiting the CoH universe. After all, they’ve got their own hero.

Seven pages into this comic book, you realize that all the pitfalls of taking on this property have not only been avoided, they’ve been translated into a brilliant success. Mark Waid has done something we in comics have by and large come to think of as impossible: he’s taken a comic book based on a videogame property and set up one of the best stories to grace the pages of any superhero comic in recent memory.

Instead of ignoring the game systems, like the fact that instead of dying, heroes are simply teleported to the hospital, Waid has made them story points. The fact that Paragon City is literally swarming with superheroes (all those players) is likewise a story point. As a player of the game who frequently gets annoyed with the game’s hokier parts, I found myself smiling as Waid referenced each of these familiar game devices. And when he turned the tables and introduced the villain, and when the diabolical plan took advantage of those same game systems, I was amazed.

Without giving anything away, this is probably the only direction a writer could have taken the property that would have elicited such a favorable review from me. The dialogue is sharp, the characterization is good, and the plotting simply jaw-dropping. Not only has Waid brought life and depth to a two-dimensional game story, but he’s managed to do it in a #1. That, as readers who keep track of my recent reviews know, is a laudable achievement.

The artwork on this book is also up to the usual Top Cow standards. David Nakayama’s pencils are clean and so beautifully detailed that it’s possible for hardcore players to recognize a lot of familiar turf. Sonia Oback’s colors are good and Troy Peteri’s varying letter styles manage to serve the story without obnoxiously stealing the show.

This has been a good year for the Cow. Having resurrected Witchblade, Top Cow can also add this title to the win column. Time will tell if this book can maintain the momentum it has begun, but for now, the effort from the whole City of Heroes creative time seems pretty darn heroic.

-Jesse Vigil