Broken Frontier

Jack Kaklamanis is the son of Medusa, he is also a P.I. and his new case is to find a runaway girl who may have run away to find her recently deceased father.

Here’s the problem with Pilot Season. What if there are more than two comics that are worth continuing? Last year, it wasn’t even close to being the case, but this year there are some solid contenders and we haven’t even seen what Jonathan Hickman is going to throw at us.

Faerber’s entry sneaks up on you. When you start reading it and you are hit with a ham fisted private dick’s inner dialogue, you start to go well, I’ve seen this before. Then you see Cyclopes and centaurs and all manner of fantasy creature running around in what appears to be our world. There even appears to be a minotaur driving a mustang!

Faerber doesn’t just stop the fun there, no, he has to hit you with more. Like Jack, the son of Medusa - people can’t just see his face so he wears a mask that hides it, allowing him a semblance of a normal life. It’s a neat conceit that Faerber does more with than just use as a threatening tactic, Jack actually has more creative ways to use it (or maybe he just has incredible luck).

Faerber plays with the conventions of the mythologies that these creatures come from and sends them into standard noir like tropes. It is a neat thing to do and something that I would love to see developed more. Just the care put into Hades here shows the reader that Faerber wants to play on our normal concepts of these beings and their settings.

The ending begs for more explanation and I would guess that is Faerber’s gambit hit. Give the reader a full story so they don’t feel left out at the end and then make it evident that there is only more fun to come.

Molina does a magnificent job here. He gives the humans that kind of cartoony look that would appeal to fans of Disney and the work of Brett Booth, but the lines and the colors play to make all the varied settings and creatures a vibrant force all their own. It is a playful art that is just as exuberant as Faerber’s script, in other words, a perfect match.

From brilliant twists like a blind lover for Medusa to an engaging and touching story of a child who just wants to get her dad back, Faerber is upping the competition this year for the Pilot Season program. It’s gonna be a tough decision.