Broken Frontier

Brandon Sause wakes up in a filthy gas station bathroom with no memory. Before he can sort out who he is or where he’s been, he’s under attack by the furiously determined Weevil. In a moment of intense shock and pain, his body morphs into something powerful and dangerous. Suddenly a fiercely effective fighter, he battles free of the Weevil and escapes. But who is he? Who can he trust? And can he discover the truth about himself before the power consumes him? The Weevil by Ethan Nicolle tells a rollicking story filled with hilarious and appealing characters. It is a solid first effort, crude, ambitious, agreeable, and above all, fun. Nicolle has created an entertaining and delightful comic book that feels as if it came from the boy next door. In other words, The Weevil is everything a comic book should be!

The story Nicolle tells in his comic book is somewhat generic. It’s set on the mean streets of Any Metropolis, USA, dubbed "Hernia" in The Weevil. The hero, Brandon Sause, is an amnesiac who must face the ultimate sacrifice, or the ultimate end. Sause is surrounded by threats of violence, and must sort out the confusion of his identity before it’s too late. He discovers he’s a tool of sinister powers and has to fight for his freedom. He has an ally, yet he stubbornly goes about finding the answers on his own. And salvation is available in an unexpected place. While you might have heard this story before, Nicolle’s version is a good one, and he makes it fun through his fantastically funny characters.

In the Nicolle-verse, animals live side-by-side with humans, doing the same jobs and speaking the same language. We meet the bird policeman, the toad cabbie, and above all, the trench-coated salamander named Syd, a cop on a mission to find Sause. The Weevil works so well as a comic book because Nicolle combines his terrific skills in drawing detailed, realistic, and expressive faces with an unerring instinct for cartooning. The characters are vivid and kinetic, and they make you laugh.

Every panel in this comic book is crammed with detail. The fight scenes – and there are a lot of fight scenes – are so complex that they are rather hard to follow. It doesn’t matter, because you have a rough idea of who will prevail. And when he’s not drawing fight scenes, Nicolle provides pages filled with dense black shading that communicates both intensity, and sharp emotion. You can linger over the pages for a long, satisfying time, enjoying the faces.

Nicolle is a self-effacing comics artist. You’ll find his apologies for his limitations in notes to the reader at the beginning and end of the book, along with his gratitude to the friendly folk who helped him along the way. While there is something rather charming about this, it also enhances the reading experience to know that Nicolle’s drawing skills matured as he completed The Weevil. We hope to see more from him, and soon.