Broken Frontier

Eleven-year-old Charlie Hobson’s quiet childhood in small-town Fifties America is changed forever with the discovery of a hidden piece of Martian tech.

It’s the 1950s and in the small suburban town of Greenview three young boys,

Charlie, Parker and Tommy, act out their fantasies of soldiers battling alien invaders. This is a very different history to the one we’re familiar with though. In this reality the U.S. is still involved in a Cold War but the Reds here aren’t the Russians. For the residents of Greenview it’s the Martians who are the ever-present threat to their freedom.

When Charlie decides to investigate the supposedly haunted Old Miller Farm he stumbles across a storage unit containing a piece of Martian weaponry. Accidentally activating it, he sets off a chain of events that brings a massive military presence to Greenview and pushes the U.S. into a potential conflict with the Martians.

White Picket Fences is a deft mix of all those cult black and white sci-fi B-movies, 1950s paranoia and endearing childhood innocence. The first thing that strikes the reader is the way that writers Anderson and Hutchins so ably imbue the story with a child’s perspective on the world. Charlie, Parker and Tommy’s reality is one of never-ending summer holidays where every day is an amazing adventure that can only ever end when it’s time to go home for dinner.

This, though, is played against the backdrop of a more sinister climate of rising tensions and possible Martian invasion. The more we see of Greenview and the alternate history of this world, the more it seems to resemble Eerie, Indiana rather than the cosy little town it initially appeared to be.

Micah Farritor’s art is a quite wonderful match for the story’s themes and atmosphere. Check out the first four pages, for example, for a superb, and unexpected, evocation of childhood imagination. His storytelling never fails to pull the reader into the child’s eye view of proceedings that makes White Picket Fences such a charming read.

There’s also a backup story featuring the adventures of Captain Odyssey, the space age comic hero that the kids of White Picket Fences adore. This is a suitable complement to the main story, further underlining the nostalgic feel of the book. I am assuming that the Flash Gordon-like Odyssey’s companion Professor Shannon is a nod in the direction of Dr. Zarkov actor Frank Shannon from the old Buster Crabbe serials!

With a bumper page count and a catchy opening installment, White Picket Fences #1 is an impressive debut. There’s a lot of promise here and I’ll certainly be looking in on issue #2.