Broken Frontier

Giffen and Grant, the writers who brought you Lobo, team up to introduce Boom Studios’ newest anti-hero. Can he keep up the company’s hot streak?

On an alien prison, some very unseemly individuals are making their escape. Ayoma Skiver, who took care of some uncomfortable necessities in solitary confinement, has taken out the guards, bypassed the prison security, and broke out two other, more dangerous prisoners. So as the former prisoners make their way through the cosmos, the prison warden decides that the only way to get these bad guys back is to release someone else from the prison. The same person who captured them the first time and was imprisoned on some strange rule: Jeremiah Harm.

On the cover of this book, Keith Giffen is called "the mind behind Marvel’s Annihilation and DC’s 52." One assumes this is to promote his genius. And while Keith Giffen has brought some great stories to the world of comics, Jeremiah Harm isn’t one of them. Giffen and Grant introduced Lobo as an intergalactic bounty hunter and here bring you another. But whereas sometimes creators take the freedom of a new publisher and improve upon their character archetypes, Jeremiah Harm does not look like he will live up to the Main Man. Oddly generic and clichéd, the writing here never really shows any punch. All of the characters are simple and basic stereotypes, from the evil gangster to the prison guards to the main character himself. If nothing else though, the story and pacing should be easy to follow, but that might have been because I saw something really similar starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes.

Somehow I’ve never heard of Rael Lyra before. But based on the visuals here I will. Easily outshining the more famous writing team, Lyra gives his readers solid character designs even without straying far from a simple humanoid design. The artwork is detailed without being crowded, highlighting the alien world without causing confusion, the reader will easily get more exposition from the artwork than the script. The storytelling and pacing work very well, with Lyra building proper momentum for all of the splash pages and large action scenes. One must also give great credit to the impressive colors of Imaginary Friends Studio, which perfectly highlight the artwork.

In rereading what I wrote about the book just now it looks like it’s not good. This isn’t necessarily so, but it becomes very hard to really get into a book that, at best, could be as good as Demolition Man.