Broken Frontier

DDP’s latest gets a special 99¢ preview treatment, and while the concept does seem a good one, its one-page teaser ads were a far superior enticement.

I’ll admit that I’ve never quite understood the point or purpose of preview editions. I understand the theory, but does getting a quarter of the first chapter of an already serialized adventure honestly offer a read that’ll make someone want to come back for more? In the case of Drafted, at least, the answer is resoundingly no; thankfully, DDP whipped up a teaser, single-page ad they placed at the very end of the preview that already had me salivating when I’d seen its picture elsewhere, and regardless of the 99¢ preview’s lackluster offerings, I still think that on the strength of that ad alone, I’ll be there come September.

Here’s the general idea I got from the brilliant one-page ad: aliens of some sort or another have arrived on Earth, and they’ve drafted all the armed forces of all the nations into a one-world, one-nation, one-cause fighting force to combat something of likely extraterrestrial origin. What a fantastic concept: like Independence Day only with a vastly more significant focus on the coming together of a nationally and racially divided world. Now here’s the skinny I got from the preview: All the usual international animosities are moving apace, when suddenly a bizarre affliction – a mental malady that causes momentary pain, incapacity, and occasionally blindness – affects all people within a certain area of Israel no matter their racial or national profile. The President of the United States sees this as (somehow) an opportunity to uplift his sagging administration, and then – bam! – we get a double page splash of a whole bunch of spacecraft hovering ominously above the planet (and no one notices this?).

As you might agree (or you might not), the preview offers only the oddest little beginning that can barely even be called that, and then the finale with the spaceships seems out-of-place and far too sudden, but I suppose it was necessary to at least point to the use of the aliens inside the preview, an association that isn’t obvious in any other part of the story. The preview isn’t un-intriguing, per se, but it isn’t terribly otherwise: it just reads like a comic whose middle and back pages fell out on the way home, leaving the reader with a read that couldn’t be more disappointing or uninspiring but only frustrating.

Writer Mark Powers may be a good storyteller, but it’s difficult to say based solely on the eight meager pages of story found here. His dialogue is unconvincingly stilted and formal, his characters pretty trope-ish, and the plotting is, of course, due to the nature of a too-short preview, impossible to discern, though again the preview didn’t leave me thinking "cool," or "wow," or "neat," or really much of anything besides "that’s it?". There’re a few news articles included in the back, supposedly cut from the headlines of the world of Drafted, though these reveal very little that the eight-pages of story don’t, and even here, though the writer did a decent job on copying the news media form, the tone of his articles are ridiculously un-journalistic and read more like fiction prose that vaguely recognizes it’s not in a book.

The art by Chris Lie and Joseph Baker is a high quality offering, and definitely very "Devil’s Due" (I’ve lately noticed a certain "in-house" look to their books, much like Dreamwave was sporting before their fall, though a different style). For a book that requires the inclusion of nearly every racial type, Lie’s characters manage a solid range of appearance – though it could manage even more (that’s a request!) – and Baker’s subtle colors are also spot-on for the depiction of more than simply black, white, and yellow-skinned persons. The President looks too youthful and silly, like a Hollywood stud with grey-dyed hair, though outside of this I have no complaints.

I’m still completely enamored with the concept, though you’d never know what the hell the concept was by reading this preview, which quite frankly isn’t even worth the piddly 99 cents they’re asking. There’s a slew of, of course, concept designs in the back of the preview that are as attention-getting as the teaser ad, but overall there’s simply nothing worth charging fans even a small sum when everything inside could (and should) easily have been posted on the company’s website for free. A great idea, and a maybe-great comic, but just wait for it and ogle the ads and save yourself the disappointment of having to read this so-called preview.