A silly riff on the superhero genre, with more than enough action and world-building to hold its own as an entertaining read, this Kickstarter’d effort from Unlikely Heroes Studios is fifty-two pages worth of fun.
Written by Justin Piatt and Zack Dolan
Illustrated by Zack DolanIn this fabulous fifty-two page first issue, you’ll thrown headfirst into the world of Super! You’ll meet hapless heroes, vindictive villains, rampaging robots, malevolent mimes, and more superpowered action than you can shake a stick at… but don’t shake a stick at it. It’ll probably shoot you with a death ray!
Meet Paula. She’s a superhero, but of course, she has to keep her identity secret. We follow her from home, to day job, to explosive villain confrontation, and through her eyes discover the wacky and not-altogether-heroic world of Cosmopolis, where there are maybe a few too many superheroes for the system to be efficient.
Most of the humour comes from the awareness that not everybody can be Batman, and while it’s a vein that could quickly have run dry if it wasn’t handled properly, Piatt and Dolan never seem to run out of comedic circumstances to work with and little one-liners to slip in. Not all the jokes hit home and there’s definitely one or two that miss the mark entirely, but the ones that do work really get the job done. An extended bar scene involving a hero who keeps slipping into gritty, convoluted reminiscences is a showstopper, and worth the price of admission on its own.
The plot isn’t too unusual, and you’ll guess the twist within the first few pages, but the light-hearted tone combined with Piatt and Dolan’s absolute refusal to slip into self-reference or smarminess keeps the pages turning. Silly or not, this is a well-thought out, coherent world – and when you recognize a couple of your favourite superheroes among the characters here, it feels more like icing, a glancing moment of parody rather than all-out satire. I think the best of these is the Streak – he runs ultra-fast, but has to strip naked to do so.
The art feels like a direct riff on modern superhero books, and Dolan really does nail that slick overall look, with the painstakingly musclebound bodies and klieg-lit cityscapes. It’s entirely convincing; but at the same time, there’s an appreciable kookiness to the body language of the characters which keeps you from forgetting that we’re dealing with an altogether different spectrum of heroes here. Again, not all the superheroes of Cosmopolis can be statuesque and mysterious, and the fumbling and flailing of the less expert members of the field – i.e., our main characters – comes across beautifully. It’s all the more impressive bearing in mind that the characters’ faces are more often covered than not; so much of the personality is there is the gestures that you barely even miss them.
The action, meanwhile, is elegantly blocked, which is a feat and a half given how many panels Dolan’s working with (a typical page features somewhere between six and twelve). As for the everyday, unmasked scenes, the expressions are solid, carrying something of an 80s vibe that really only adds to the camp and fun of it all.
Everardo Orozco’s colours are bright and glowy, bringing to mind modern “Green Lantern” issues and pushing that shiny, futuristic aesthetic even further. The flesh tones don’t always look right, and sometimes there’s a little too much shadow added to the faces, but overall the colouring adds a wonderful polish to the book. Meanwhile, Piatt’s lettering is generally solid but does have its iffy moments when the font skews small. Similarly, a bit more white space around the text would help the larger chunks of information breathe better, even if it means obscuring the art more.
This is a fast, engaging read, and coming in a $2.99 for a 52-page issue, it’s excellent bang for your buck. It immerses you in a big, action-packed world, and it’s full of goofy characters and superhero comic in-jokes that will definitely make you laugh. So, if some action-packed giggles feel like the right thing to top off your afternoon, by all means, get “Super!”.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Check it out!
