Broken Frontier

Jeremiah Harm, the baddest bounty hunter in the galaxy takes on Ayoma Skyver, one of the baddest henchwomen in the galaxy.

Dak Moira and his second-in-command, Brune, continue through (and into) the streets of the Bronx, while Harm and Skyver have a lengthy go at each other’s throats in what reads like an anti-buddy action comedy that’s heavy on the former, light on the latter. Meanwhile, the citizens of Earth fear for their lives as a dome that has been placed over the city causes the oxygen in the air to slowly thin out. Jeremiah Harm is begrudgingly on the case.

This comic is "old school" in that it focuses mainly on holding a reader’s interest through action and bad-ass characterization rather than developing plot through 22-pages of direct exposition. That type of storytelling appeals to me sometimes, but with Jeremiah Harm’s continual jumps between congruous scenes I felt a little lost. Sure, Giffen’s plot sounds interesting: bad guy gets hold of an interstellar relic left over from the Big Bang, and plans to use it to bring an end to the universe; and Grant writes characters with the requisite gusto—I particularly like Brune, a bad guy made up entirely of poisonous gas. The problem in these pages is that the pace is jarringly uneven to the point that the final pages are a welcome site.

Though it’s likely not for everyone, one saving grace is Rael Lyra’s harsh and gritty line work, which lends well to the setting of this dark, dingy, urban-centric issue. Ironically, when I first saw the interior art on this series, I thought of Trencher (written and penciled by Giffen), a series published by Image in the early 1990s. The look of Trencher was probably the least refined of any "professionally published" comic I’ve ever laid eyes on, and initially Lyra’s contribution takes on a similar appearance. However, those opening pages are particularly busy, what with Ayoma Skyver literally tearing some locals apart, and when the dust settles Lyra’s more polished technique shines through.

Sadly, most of the characters are one-dimensional, and those that aren’t seem to be based off characters we’ve seen before. Aside from that, Jeremiah Harm #3 is just a little too thin on plot development to really draw readers in and have them craving for more. While the ending leaves the (anti)hero in a somewhat interesting predicament, too little occurred for me to care much about what might happen next.