Broken Frontier

A crashed alien prison ship unleashes a mighty (if dim) warrior upon a small unsuspecting town.

While passing over Earth, a spaceship set to transfer galactic criminals to the prison-world of Kyln has an unexpected systems failure. The resulting crashreleases a handful of extraterrestrial menaces with wonderfully pleasant names like Lunatik, the Blood Brothers, Paibok the Power Skrull, and Drax the Destroyer. The crash is witnessed by a pair of misfit kids—tomboyish Cammi and geeky Dex—who think it nothing more than a shooting star. They have no idea of the bizarre turn their young lives are about to take.

Drax was never a character that I knew or cared much about. Ask me who he is and I’d probably say "Moondragon’s dad" and be hard-pressed to tell you much else. But with Marvel making a preview of this miniseries available, I was willing to give the big lug a chance. I was pleasantly surprised, if not exactly floored, by this first issue. Keith Giffen’s trademark sense of humor is put to good effect in the story. He manages to create a unique form of alien slang in the prisoners’ dialogue and plays their considerable egos off each other with amusing results. He establishes the kids as immediately likeable and a bit peculiar (Cammi scares off a bully by telling him to "ask me what happened to my brother…He was delicious"). Giffen also wins the reader’s sympathy by giving us a glimpse of dysfunction in the children’s families.

What he doesn’t provide, however, is much to distinguish Drax himself (at least not at this stage of the story). Little is established about our hero other than the fact that he is big, green, nigh-invulnerable, and dumb as a post. At least one of these assumptions is challenged before issue’s end but on the whole, Drax seems very similar to that other big, green, nigh-invulnerable Marvel hero. To be honest, I found Cammi’s snarky and independent personality the bigger draw to come back for a second issue than the title character.

Drax does have another draw however and that’s the lovely artwork of Mitch Breitweiser and Brian Reber. Breitweiser’s pencils are beautifully detailed and capture the distinct traits of the characters admirably. Matching Giffen’s script moment for moment, his art produces a strong sense of Cammi’s mischief, Dex’s clueless sincerity, the sinister qualities of the alien crooks, and an innate sadness in Drax himself. Reber’s colors are lush yet subtle, creating almost a soft-focus painterly feel that makes the images stand out from the average sci-fi comic.

I can’t fully recommend this comic but neither can I completely discount it. There are signs of a fun story here and with a little more development for the lead, Drax could be an entertaining mini.