Broken Frontier

Dallas McCoy is one of the world’s finest bodyguards, but when she’s hired to protect a child star she may have bitten off more than she can chew.

Dallas McCoy is a pretty straightforward action adventure with a little thriller thrown in. Dallas’ last job was Die Hard on a bigger budget, so she’s been assigned to a bore of a case because the boss man knows she needs a vacation but won’t take one. Turns out this new case is for a Hollywood brat, Celeste Robbins, who has a stalker setting his sights on her. It’s the kind of cake job most agents would love, except Celeste has gone through half a dozen security agents in a rather short span of time. Dallas tries to maintain her job and her sanity while trying to protect the annoying young Ms. Robbins…as long as she can avoid killing the little girl herself.

Rorschach Entertainment’s website explains among its submissions guidelines that they are looking solely for one-shots or miniseries, nothing maxi or ongoing please and thank you. I can appreciate or even embrace that. The problem with that kind of storytelling though is that the writer has to build the character(s) rather quickly for the audience to be able to relate to what those characters might be feeling about the situations presented in the plot.

Meredith and Riddle have a tough time selling Dallas as anything more than a token action figure. She is your typical comic book heroine--athletic, attractive, smart and take-no-crap-tough-as-nails. She’s also got a secret past with the United States government. That adds up a certain level of predictability and a tough sell in the comic industry…particularly for a black and white independent book. The characters in Dallas McCoy are mostly one-dimensional and uninteresting. The writers do manage to add some flavor to the story by injecting a narrative that connotes the story being a stage play. I’m not sure why this was done, but oddly, it affords the more lighthearted pseudo-manga art by Sidney Lima to blend with the script.

Speaking of Lima, the greatest strength of his artwork is the action sequence. There is a frenetic energy generated among these scenes that is clear and maintains a good pace. I’m no action junkie, but the problem is that there are too few such scenes. In an otherwise mediocre story, Lima’s art is a saving grace.

Perhaps I’ve read too many comics and seen too many movies for my own good. Maybe I’ve become jaded. Or maybe I would like to see more thinking outside the box, especially from indie comics. Whatever my malfunction, stories like this one-shot don’t serve to fix it.