Cover: Jacen Burrows
Writer: David Lapham
Art: Javier Barreno
Nothing is sacred as Crossed returns! The biggest hit horror series of the year returns with an all-new six-issue series written by David (Stray Bullets) Lapham! Set right at the start of the Crossed outbreak, this epic tale of depravity promises to shock and disturb you with even more intensity than the first series! The Pratt family lived a idyllic life on a horse ranch in North Carolina. A few generations of family working, living, and learning together. But not all things should be shared with, nor done to, other human beings. Much less your own family. Some men are just born evil, some men are turned Crossed. But which is worse? Imagine, for a moment, the worst crimes against humanity. Picture the cruelest affronts to decency. Conjure your darkest nightmares… and then realize it could all be so much worse. When civilization crumbles in one terrifying moment; when people are gleefully breaking into unthinkable acts of violence all around you; when everyone you love has died screaming in agony: What do you do? There is no help. There is no hope. There is no escape. There are only the Crossed.
Crossed: Family Values #1 is available with a Regular cover by Jacen Burrows, a Wraparound cover by series artist Javier Barreno, a Torture cover by Juan Jose Ryp, and a special rare Red Crossed retailer incentive.
Follow behind the cut for my thoughts
It must be a tough job to follow Garth Ennis. Seriously – with a book like Crossed, which is almost a tribute to depravity and the horribleness of basic human nature, how do you follow it? Well, with Family Values.
Often times, when you get a sequel to a story that doesn’t have an original time on it, you get worried. This can be in any situation, not just comics. However, it turns out that for a first issue Lapham and Barrento manage to follow Ennis quite well, and the future of volume 2 in the world of Crossed looks like it will be a bright albeit dark one.
As the issue opens, we are introduced to our new heroes – the Pratt family. With our female lead introducing us to the family, we see that the world is already rather dark even before the Crossed enter into it. With a family of ten kids, one of the first things we learn is that the father is a child molester, and has been for quite some time, preying on his own daughters. The horrifying nature of this story comes when the Crossed arrive and our heroine has to choose – what’s worse, death and a future as the Crossed, or siding with a child molester to survive? Similarly dark questions were asked in the previous volume, but I will say this – the heroes of the first Crossed story never picked a side. The young lady Pratt does.
I don’t think I’ve read anything by David Lapham before, but I enjoyed his writing here. Unlike the original Crossed, this does take some time to get the story going. There’s no issue #0 here to set the tone, so it’s up to Lapham to give the engine a good start before we get going. While I prefer the idea where you’re thrown into the story as it’s happening, this ends up working well enough too. It’s not long before everything goes to hell, both in the sense of the Crossed arriving and the general situation at home being shown to us. When following Garth Ennis as a writer, one has to expect a certain sense of depravity, and Lapham definitely shows a dark side with his story telling. Granted, I’m not familiar with what he has done before, so maybe all his work is like this, but when your first issue is dark even without the Crossed in it, it’s a good sign you could effectively follow.
Of course, just as much as following Ennis must be tough, following Burrows must be even harder. The man is amazing at artistically engineering these crazy dark and violent worlds. Javier Barreno does a great job though. The landscapes aren’t as vast, but there’s a pretty great splash page when the Crossed first arrive, and there’s still plenty of obscene violence and gore. Barreno actually seems to emulate Burrows style of faces a bit, if a bit thinner and a tad prettier. Where Burrows seems to focus on the dark, Barreno offers a twisted version of it showing both the light and the dark. And why not? There is a sense of optimism at the beginning. It doesn’t take long for everything to go downhill, and when it does Barreno captures all the continued darkness of the story.
While Crossed: Family Values will obviously show us another side of the same coin (to an extent), it does look to be going a completely different route. Instead of JUST a tale of a survival, we’ll get a tale of a family in a horrific world, and that opens all sorts of new doors. I’m interested to see what’s going to happen next, and that’s usually what you want to see with a first issue. While I’m not sure if it’ll stand up to the depravity of the first volume, there are already plenty of extremely dark moments, so I’d say it’s a good start.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Buy
