Broken Frontier

The Twilight Guardian keeps a vigil over the streets of Suburbia.  She makes the safe streets… safe?

Troy Hickman delves into the mind of a wannabe.  Our “hero” is a young woman who puts on a mask and hood to patrol the streets of her very normal neighborhood.  She studies books on criminology, television crime dramas, and of course, comic books.  This is all to make her better as a superhero.  Thing is she’s kind of boring.

That’s the problem with this book. It is boring. This whacked out girl is supposedly keeping the streets safe at night, but at the first sign of trouble (like say, a black cat) she crosses the street.  Hardly awe inspiring.  Thing is after the first time she pulls a “it would be safer to ignore it” move, every possible bit of tension in the book is removed.  You hope that she will do something, anything, but it never happens.  It makes for a tedious read.  It is like one of those really bad reality shows.  You know the ones, the kind where you watch it and go… who thought this would be entertaining?

As a short, this story has a little bit of potential and would have been a welcome addition to Superior Showcase, Popgun, or Flight.  As a pilot season entry, this reader wonders why anyone would vote for it.  “Please may I have more stories of the sad delusion woman who wonders the streets at night imagining serving Justice?”

To make it even worse, Hickman has all the makings of a good comic.  His dialogue is believable.  He writes a coherent narrative.  He has the genesis of a good idea here.  I believe that a person like this girl could exist, heck they probably do.  There’s no payoff here.  Fans of Clowes or Tomine will tell you that you can make the mundane into a compelling story.  Thing is you have to have some kind of tension or point.  There is nothing here, no real danger, no character developing action, no mean words, no moral.  Nothing, it ends as it began, a girl wondering the dark streets of a safe area, imagining she is a superhero.  It’s like Kick-Ass, without all the kicking of butt.  The story is so static that I actually was pulled out of my suspension of disbelief wondering when this chick sleeps.  That was the only entertainment I got out of the book.

The art is nice.  If you like the art on the current incarnation of Hack/Slash, you will like this.  Like the work of Emily Stone, Reza’s art allows the coloring of Imaginary Friends Studios to fill in the detail and make the lines more dynamic.  It’s a little stiff, but the coloring makes for realistic rendering.

All in all, this is an interesting idea.  Hickman just forgot to write an interesting story. In a lot a ways it is disappointing.  Don’t worry though, if you were looking for a book that would tell you what that creepy guy at your Local Comic Shop is like at home, this is probably pretty close.  It does have that going for it.