“Almighty” #1 makes big promises of Mad Max style road warrior action paired with the eerie, cosmic body horror of Annihilation. The premise is big, if a little tired, especially in a The Last of Us drenched TV landscape. That’s to say, “Almighty” #1 focuses on a mysterious, powerful bounty hunter/hired gun and the youth they’re charged with protecting, and taking home. Unlikely duos traversing the apocalypse are a dime a dozen these days, so “Almighty” #1 has to do a lot to stand out from the pack. Overall, the story looks good but just doesn’t gel into something as captivating as what it promises.
Cover by Edward Laroche“Almighty” #1
Written & Illustrated by Edward Laroche
Colored by Brad Simpson
Lettered by Jaymes Reed
Reviewed by Kobi BordoleyTHE WARNING writer/artist EDWARD LAROCHE returns to comics with a five-issue epic! Max Max: Fury Road-style action combines with the mutated horror of Annihilation in this original sci-fi/fantasy epic for mature readers. The year is 2098 in a Third World America ravaged by economic collapse anarcho-warfare and a mysterious environmental disaster contained behind a massive wall. A girl has been abducted and a killer has been hired to find her and bring her home.
“Almighty” #1 starts with some all caps exposition on its blood red title page, which seems like an attempt at letting us know the intensity of what follows. By itself, this is pretty captivating. The title card tells us that the year is 2059, and the USA has been through decades of civil war. However, some catastrophic environmental disaster brought the warring factions together, and they contained the catastrophe behind a massive wall — all at an extreme cost. What remains of the country is a third world waste land ruled by motorcycle gangs, ravenous bandits, and hooligans of all shape and size. This premise already feels both overly complex and incredibly vague, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Big world building often involves a lot of moving parts, but in the case of “Almighty” #1, the murkiness about what’s happened to the world doesn’t manifest as intrigue on the page, but as confusion and lack of buy in from the audience.
The story the opens with one of our protagonists, a youngish/teenage girl, running from a house, hounded by a gang of the previously mentioned bandits. While some of the dialogue here is pretty goofy, some of it’s also creepy enough for us to believe that these gangs are as deranged as the premise promises. The baddies yelling “Muthafucka” while shooting into the wind, however, does dispel some of the drama. All this is small beans though, what really breaks the immersion is the lack of apparent world building, and the sense of disharmony in the art (which is all good, by the way). For example, based on the premise (Mad Max + Annihilation), you’d expect some pretty extreme or intense visual markers of the changed world, especially if it’s been ravaged by civil war and mysterious environmental disasters. Instead, we see our young protagonist running from a pretty average looking ranch house, past upright, connected telephone poles, pursued by baddies kitted out in matching tactical gear/uniforms with pretty nice weapons. The only thing that really indicates this world is “post apocalyptic” is that two of the baddies wear weird Nazgul-esque cloth hoods, and the leader has a forehead tattoo and green hair. As the protagonist and Fale, the bounty hunter, continue their road trip accross desiccated America, things look…pretty scenic. Apart from the fact that they eat canned food and everyone has bad tattoos and worse gang codenames, there’s not much to indicate that the world has fallen apart. There are few set pieces in “Almighty” #1, and not much sense of scale, place, or that kind of lived-in-ness that gives a world its character. The world of “Almighty” #1 is pretty bleak, not intentionally but just because it lacks detail. There’s a goofiness here that could be campy in a certain context, but in “Almighty” #1 its just not clear if the jokes are intentional or not.
This may seem like nitpicking (am I really going off about the powerlines?), and we can admit that some of it is, and that any review is more subjective than not, but in aggregate, “Almighty” #1 just leaves a lot to be desired. The landscapes could be fuller, the baddies badder, the protagonists fuller, and so on and so on. That being said, the pacing in “Almighty” #1 is pretty good, with cuts from action to flashback to montage flowing pretty seamlessly. There is mystery, too — what are these weird forehead tattoos? Why is our protagonist important? Who hired Fale, and why do they look like that? “Almighty” #1 wasn’t overly dense or so much of a pastiche that it didn’t hold our attention, so it has that going for it. There’s a kernel of an interesting, gripping story here, it just hasn’t found it’s footing. One place where “Almighty” #1 excels is in its colors. Simpson paints the page with a lot of ochre, yellow tones that maybe do the best of job at convincing the audience that this is a changed world. There’s certainly something sickly about the world of “Almighty” #1 that’ intriguing. In future issues, we’d love to see the world fleshed out more, to give it more heft. Perhaps this five part miniseries will pull its weight by the end, and we’re hoping the creative team can forge the boilerplate aspects of the story into a finer metal by the time this thing is done.
Final Verdict: 6.0. More dust than danger, this is a post apocalyptic story that’s still trying to find its footing.
