Broken Frontier

In Foolkiller: White Angels #1, Darius Goode is released from prison only to be confronted by a group of white supremacists who call themselves the White Angels. It's up to Foolkiller to make the White Angels pay for their crimes.

We've all heard this story before: a man commits a crime, serves his sentence, and tries to start all over after he's released, but he's constantly reminded of his troubled past and works to overcome it. It's the introduction of Foolkiller that saves this story from complete mediocrity. The first issue does an excellent job of carefully setting up Foolkiller without giving away too many details about him or including him in too many scenes.

Paul Azaceta's pencils leave a lot to be desired. Many panels are filled with muddled lines, so muddled that occasionally I had a hard time making out distinct facial features in the characters. Azaceta's style does, however, bring a grittiness to the book that's appropriate given the subject matter.

One severely lacking detail in the artwork is any sense of action or motion. There are very few motion lines in the book, and more often than not characters feel more like static images on the page than living, breathing people. What results is a book that tries to tell an action-packed story in the most boring way possible. The most interesting panels were the ones that involved a conversation between Foolkiller and another character.

Darius Goode acts as the narrator for most of the story, but Hurwitz can't decide how he wants to portray Goode. In one instant we see Goode studying for the GED and using a fair amount of slang, but in the next he's giving a lofty speech with metaphors. It's likely that Hurwitz became too ambitious. He wanted the story to be meaningful and dramatic, and he wanted to use Goode as the narrator so that it felt more personal to readers, but Goode simply isn't up to the task of exploring deeper meanings. If Hurwitz was so interested in exploring the underlying message of the story, he should have used a narrator more suited to the task.

It's hard not to think of Frank Castle when reading Foolkiller: White Angels. The similarities between Foolkiller and the Punisher are too obvious to ignore, so I think it's good that the Punisher is set to appear in the next issue. Instead of avoiding an appearance by the Punisher and treating him like the elephant in the room, Hurwitz will be able to put him side by side with Foolkiller and acknowledge the similarities and differences.

Foolkiller: White Angels #1 was a mediocre read, but some of the problems can be attributed to Darius Goode's backstory. Now that the wheels have been set in motion, so to speak, Hurwitz will need to focus on the details of the story that make it interesting: Foolkiller and the action.