Broken Frontier

At some point or another everyone feels like they’re not like everyone else. For Aaron Chiang it’s about to prove very true.

A new fantasy series from Top Cow and, surprisingly it does not feature scantily clad heroines or really buff heroes… now there’s a departure! In all seriousness, though, Marz has gone on record as saying that he considers this title to be All Ages and that is not a field where Top Cow has really ventured before. So has Marz really crafted something that can be enjoyed by everyone from 8 to 80? Let’s see…

Aaron Chiang leads a fairly normal life – raised by his mother, a writer of fantasy novels, he attends the local middle school and gets bullied for being half-Chinese and a little bit nerdy. All par for the course for a lot of kids. But then 13 year-old Aaron learns that his heritage is a little more complex than being half-Chinese when he starts turning green and breathing fire on the local bully! Now Aaron’s safe world is turned upside-down as long-hidden secrets are revealed. He may have abilities he’s never dreamed of but there are also those out there who will hunt and kill him because of it. Aaron’s life has just gotten a whole lot harder.

On the whole, Marz actually does succeed in his aims here. The story is certainly accessible to the young and old alike and the main character’s feelings of being a "fish out of water" will be familiar to many. The characters’ dialogue gets a little clunky in a few places but overall it reads naturally and Aaron looks and feels like a real kid – caught on the cusp of wanting to grow up yet still having his head caught up in realms of the fantastic. It is this that provides the little bit of ironic counterpoint as he discovers that his life is becoming one of those realms of the fantastic and yet he’s still going to have to grow up fast to face a much tougher future. Despite all of these positives, though, there still seems to be something missing from the issue. As a reader I found myself wanting to know more about the villains here as well as more about the history of the dragon-kind. Since this is only the first issue out of five I’m willing to let those curiosities pass for now in the belief that Marz will begin to flesh things out even more as the tale goes on.

The look of the comic is mostly down to Lee Moder’s pencil work. While Moder can give his figures a somewhat sharp, angular look from time to time he resists that temptation here. He uses a nice, realistic style that works well, emphasizing the ordinariness of the human figures and the extraordinariness of the dragons.

Admittedly there is little new here – more a mix and match of various fantasy elements but some younger readers may give it a chance because of comparisons to the Disney animated TV series American Dragon: Jake Long. For older readers there is still a story with a lot of potential and a so far engaging lead character. Dragon Prince #1 may not spontaneously combust off the page but sometimes the slow burn is the better story. We’ll wait and see.