Broken Frontier

Duncan Rosenblatt is your typical kid. Having just turned 16, he’d like to get a car, but his mother isn’t sure about the whole driving thing. I guess it’s important to mention that his parents are divorced and that his dad is Belloc, a demon. Oh yeah, his dad’s 16^th birthday gift to his son, a homicidal sparring robot that has decided to go on a murderous rampage.

That’s a heck of a lot to put in your first issue. Fortunately this isn’t Firebreather’s first rodeo. A few years ago there was an initial mini and a graphic novel. After a little bit of a hiccup, the book is back and hopefully to stay.

Phil Hester is one of those comics writers like Mark Waid, Gail Simone, or Robert Kirkman; you know that he lives for this stuff. That enthusiasm for the medium comes across in his work. Here he takes a fairly standard demon-human mixed breed kid and instills the same kind of heart that you see in Invincible or Ryan Choi. Above all else, this is a kid still developing. Mad at his parents for not making a go of it and worried about both of them more than he would care to admit.

Yet through all the turmoil and absurdity of his life, he still manages to make friends. This is where the primary dramatic thrust of this book comes into play. He’s human at heart and like Mark Grayson, Duncan is struggling with what his heart tells him is right and what his dad’s mission is. It is the humanity that allows him to see ways to keep the folks in his town safe and his demon instinct that allows him to be vicious when needed.

Kuhn. I’m not real sure what he’s been doing since he put the book on hiatus, but it is good to see him back on Duncan. His chunky, but minimal art is the perfect mix for the action in the book. It also adds a nice style to go with the funky fantasy of the book.

Firebreather is comic fun at its best, absurd but entertaining. Action packed but emotionally relevant. Kuhn and Hester are some of the best in the field and this is the book they were meant to do.