Broken Frontier

Nick Landime bravely goes in search of customer satisfaction and somehow gets drawn into the murky world of international espionage and Reality T.V.

Nick Landime Versus the World Crime League is…well, it’s insane. This new one-shot from Shooting Star Comics features a fan favourite character from some earlier anthologies in an expanded adventure. Reading this comic is like eating alcoholic fairy floss; it’s fluffy and non-confrontational, full of cheap thrills and quick giggles, is likely to leave you with a slight headache and should probably be kept away from children. Its plot flows like the rambling of a really weird person, which is quite fitting because that is essentially what the story is. It sidesteps nearly every criticism a comic might normally attract because it quite clearly does not care.

The story, such as it is, revolves around the eponymous Nick Landime who works at a sports bar. ‘Works at’ is a term I use loosely because it doesn’t appear that he does all that much there. When his bar is trashed by its patrons due to an outage in the cable T.V., Nick heads off to the cable company’s headquarters in search of customer satisfaction. On arrival he nearly runs over James Bond and gets messed up in a whole series of off the wall goings-on that makes fun of Bond villains, reality T.V., sports fans and George Lucas.

The comic doesn’t have any themes nor does its humour have any clear targets. The entire exercise seems to be one giant excuse to tell jokes about "waking up at the crack of one" and how bad reality T.V. is. It’s enjoyable for a few minutes but never engaging. The humour is based around a series of unconnected one-line gags and as such is rather uneven.

The artwork is also uneven. It does the bare minimum– depict the characters– and not much else. It only assists the humour and is very rarely the source of any enjoyment. The inking and shading is all over the place but is not actually bad.

Nothing about this comic is bad; really, it just doesn’t do enough of any one thing to qualify as being good. It is insane but not by much, funny but only to a certain extent and so bad it’s good but then again only within limits…However, Nick Landime Versus the World Crime League is what it is and it seems comfortable with that and who can complain about that?

-Matthew Clark