Broken Frontier

Each and every week, a million fans around the globe tune in to watch their favorite wrestlers dress up and play out their act of insanity and drama. The stars
of World Wrestling Entertainment® Superstars and Divas create stories to entertain these masses and Titan Publishing is now taking these adventures to another arena. The arena of comics, that is!

And in no other venue than in comics can you go this far beyond the limitations real life bestows upon us. This is the ultimate place you can explore through time and space freely and use special effects unlike anything you can see in real life and at only a fraction of the costs James Cameron used (although I thank him favorably for strengthening the economy in the entertainment industry).

But enough of that... today we talk comics. Comics portraying real life persons - albeit make believe alter egos - have been fun for ages now! Mostly due to the influence of Kiss and their Psycho Circus (McFarlane / Image comics), the entertaining aspects of these "real" people infusing comics with pure magic have made a big impact on me. Kiss' Psycho Circus and all the Kiss comics before (Marvel) and after (Dark Horse, Platinum) were created by people who knew that the legends that made them seem so magical in real life would make them gods in comics.


Titan Comics have found a real winner in Keith Champagne. The writer knows how to access this "bigger and better" aspect, like the above mentioned examples, to take his story to another level. Looking at the debut issue and seeing the art, he understands the flow needed to get this story across.

And to talk about this story is to talk about drama and fiction in many facets. We see the eternal struggle between the King of Shadows and the Firstborn, pitted against the backdrop of the WWE arena and its varied characters.

We see the struggle of supernatural beings as a petty struggle, but one that spans centuries and intertwines with the history of the human world. The readers are shown biblical scenes (Cain and Abel) as well as mythical rewritings, where King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are up against the evil Mordred. Historically significant moments I know not enough of (the Aztecs' Montezuma perhaps?) are mixed with leopard-people and zombies, yet still the struggle continues via the Civil War and the Second World War to have a finish at the last page of the comic at the arena of Wrestlemania in the current day!

Every time one of these two die, they will be reincarnated and resurrected into a new era, where they will need to rediscover their purpose and seek out their eternal opponent. Through the ages the King of Shadows has been seeking out the Firstborn, always being defeated (of course, since this is the dogma of a comic-waged war every single time!) one way or another. The Shadowking this time, however, has followers of his own Dark Church setting up shop at Wrestlemania Unabomber-style to dish out "a thousand random acts of pain," spearheaded by a bald Dark Priest who has uncovered the Firstborn incarnated as a World Wrestling Entertainment® Superstar nonetheless.

How this will all pan out is up to the second arc but fans of Wrestlemania and entertaining old-school comics about "eternal struggle" will find their due in these pages of WWE Heroes.

I also feel the need to address the production value. The glossy pages and heavy quality cover are something that might indeed warrant the 22-page story and the ads throughout the comic are aimed at the reading audience and therefore are not annoying, but in this particular comic add to the product itself.

WWE Heroes #1 went on-sale March 24th 2010, and is available from all good retailers and specialist comic stores.

For more information on WWE Heroes comic, visit:  http://www.wwecomics.com