As claimed in this week’s Comics Should Be Cheap, I picked up this book solely because I dug Michael Avon Oeming’s cover. With the books that Image is putting out these days, though, that’s hardly a gamble. How does BlackAcre compare to the other books this publisher has been debuting?
Written by Duffy Boudreau
Illustrated by Wendell Cavalcanti100 YEARS AFTER THE FALL… A NEW GREAT GAME BEGINS.
A retired soldier on a secret mission… sent out from the walled city and the only life he’s ever known into the violent wilderness of the world after the fall! Tribal cults, roaming bands of barbarians, vicious warlords! A startling new take on the post-apocalypse and the most auspicious comics debut of the year!
There are many theories to how you do a first issue. Some writers insist that you must utilize that first issue to get as much world-building out of the way as possible to ensure your readers enter issue number two with their feet firmly planted on the ground, while other writers throw their readers into the deep end and hope they can swim. Duffy Boudreau leans more toward the latter, and in the span of a single issue, he has built an entire world from the ground-up before our very eyes. The impressive thing about this is that we never are left feeling like we are being lectured to; well, I take that back — at first we are being lectured to, quite literally, as a form of framing device, and it works well as a way to begin the book. Boudreau knows, however, that such an approach can get tiring very quickly, and jumps right at that magic, price-is-right moment. The prologue, despite being set in the future, explains how we got from our world of 2012 to the world of “BlackAcre,” and the rest of the issue is split up into a variety of scenes, each no more than four pages long, that help strengthen the book’s foundation while leading us in the general direction of where the book will be going from here. By the issue’s end, the reader may not know every nook and cranny of the “BlackAcre” Earth, but they will certainly feel like their feet are firmly planted.
Of course, this level of exposition does come at a price. While Boudreau does inject a fair amount of personality into this comic for the amount of setting, it isn’t until the final page where we really get an idea of where the story is going. Now, this may seem to be an unfair judgment — “BlackAcre” is hardly the only comic that doesn’t really get started until after the first issue is through — but it does put the book in an unsteady position. Many will probably be sold solely on the world that Boudreau and artist Wendell Cavalcanti have built in the span of an issue, those who are not convinced by the setting alone won’t have too much else to push them over the fence. The dialogue in this issue is good, but at the same time it definitely has the sound of exposition to it in most places — subtle, not at all heavy-handed exposition, but it still has a certain tone to it that goes hand-in-hand with getting the story started. We don’t get enough of what Boudreau’s writing looks like when he’s actually “going” in this issue, which is a shame; while we can place our bets based on how well he established his setting, you only get started once.
Cavalcanti’s art can be compared to other post-Brian Hitch comics artists, taking cues from the “Authority” co-creator’s bold lines while avoiding the heavy doses of photorealism that Hitch tends to work with. Cavalcanti may be informed by Hitch and other turn-of-the-century artists, but he is hardly beholden to them; both his figures and his backgrounds hover in the middle of the realistic/stylized gradient as suits the purposes of the story while never breaking visual consistency. Nor does he stick to standard panels of choice, making sure to keep the reader moving and viewing the action at different angles and differences. The result, however, is mixed: while some of Cavalcanti’s sequences are grade-A dynamite (the one at the bottom of story page nine is top notch work from someone with a clear idea of how to tell story through pictures), others do not work quite as intended, slowing the reader down and dulling the story. Cavalvanti and colorist Antonio Fabela are yet another penciler/colorist duo from Image who seem to go hand in hand much like Tradd Moore and Filipe Sobreiro or Shawn Martinbrough and Felix Serrano, and while Cavalcanti’s art is quite different from Martinbrough’s, something about the way him and Fabela mesh together recall the visual dynamic of “Thief of Thieves,” and in a very good way.
Boudreau and Cavalcanti have provided a very solid start with this first issue of “BlackAcre,” but, to repeat myself, you only get started once. This issue is definitely good as a #1, but does not give much of an indication of what can be expected to follow, in terms of quality. Don’t let my cynicism fool you, though; this is a strong start that warrants sticking it out until the second issue before passing final judgment, especially when everything else that can be said about it is positive.
Final Verdict: 7.8 – Buy it!
