Broken Frontier

At the risk of making an obvious Scream reference, there are certain rules to successfully surviving a #1. Rule Number One: Make a solid first impression. Rule Number Two: Never ever let your characters introduce themselves with ridiculously corny dialogue. And Rule Number Three: Make sure your reader has a solid grasp of the book’s story when the issue ends.

I was going to make that a funny list, but you may have noticed that the comics industry is in the middle of an epidemic of lackluster #1s. And that’s not funny at all.

So here’s the premise of City of Tomorrow!, WildStorm Signature’s latest six-issue miniseries. The setting seems to be a world similar to ours, where America’s been the victim of terrorism and is responding with questionable force and tactics. Meanwhile, a man named Eli Foyle has built a new nation of nanotechnology-driven candy-coated innocence, confusingly named Columbia.

As the story unfolds, our time is divided between the 10-15 year period during which Columbia is created and the actions of a black-bag wetworks group that kills terrorists, makes crude jokes, and plants weapons of mass destruction in order to justify military action.

It seems very likely that the son of Columbia’s founder is actually also the main black-bag spy guy, but in an all-grown-up version. The boy’s name is Tucker and the spy guy is sometimes referred to as "T", but the connection is never made clear. The closest he gets to identifying himself is when he introduces himself to a gratuitously-placed prostitute, saying "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." Later when he coarsely describes certain indiscretions with a commanding officer to fellow soldiers in words that seem ripped from late-night Skinamax, you wonder how long "T" has been practicing his glib in front of the mirror.

If T and Tucker are the same person, this presents a lot of confusing little quandaries when it comes to trying to follow the plot of City of Tomorrow!. Their stories are intercut, so what’s the order of events here? More than likely this will all get tied up and make more sense with subsequent issues, but the readers need a little clue. Much like the first issue of The Twilight Experiment, this WildStorm title shares some kind of aversion to indicating the chronology of the events in the pages of its inaugural issue.

Howard Chaykin’s story begins well, and its conceptual work is intriguing, but the writing is too obtuse in concept and too on-the-nose in its references to be enjoyed to the fullest. At the end of the first issue, it’s unclear what the hook of the story is. It is impossible to miss Chaykin’s political viewpoints however, since the parallels between T’s black-bag ops and popular opinion about current U.S. foreign policy are there for all to see. Meanwhile, the sex is unceremoniously shoved in front of the reader’s face at every opportunity; neither necessary nor at all appealing.

Chaykin’s pencils are competent, but the design is lacking. This version of the future with its robots and punk kids isn’t that far removed from Transmetropolitan or any number of the short-lived dystopic sci-fi series that have followed in its wake.

Everyone’s always whining about how comics readers never want to give a new title a chance. They just buy X-Men and Spider-Man. Whine, whine, whine, they won’t give new stuff a break.

Well, no kidding. Too many #1s have been disappointingly average in their debut. It’s no wonder the big sellers are the old standards. Be solid in the art and write stories that make our eyes go wide with wonder the way they did the first time we read those old stories, and you’ll have us hook, line, and sinker.

It could turn out that City of Tomorrow! is a compelling read. From the looks of it, Chaykin has been setting up a couple of plot twists for the issues to follow. But the hook is missing from this critical #1, in both story and visuals. If you’re looking for a fresh new read, there isn’t enough here to recommend it on its own merits. Hopefully this will change.

-Jesse Vigil