Imagine you live in a world where anyone and everyone can be a superhero. It’s a commonplace as being a barista and about half as well paying. You fork over what little you have each month to the mysterious entity that keeps your heroics funded, but what happens when you default on your loan? Well, the Paybacks come collecting!
Thanks to the brutal comic overlords at Heavy Metal, the little superhero satire that could returns with a brand new series from the series original creators Donny Cates, Eliot Rahal and Geoff Shaw.
Read on for our full spoiler free review of the all-new “The Paybacks” #1!
Written by Donny Cates & Eliot Rahal
Illustrated by Geoff Shaw
Heroism doesn’t come cheap, so when superheroes borrow money to finance their genetic enhancements or crime-fighting supercomputers, their debts make student loans look like IOUs! Enter the Paybacks, a repo squad composed of bankrupt former heroes here to foreclose on everybody’s secret lairs! From the team that delivered the acclaimed Buzzkill!
It only took a page before I got hit with a sudden rush of deja vu when reading “The Paybacks” #1. Somehow, I hadn’t made the connection until that point that I’d already reviewed “The Paybacks” #1, back when it debuted its original series at Dark Horse, calling it “essential reading” that made fun of superhero comics out of love. That’s some pretty high praise looking back on it, but praise I stand by. “The Paybacks” was a fantastic series at Dark Horse and it was a devastating loss when it ended. Thankfully, though, the recent reinvigorated Heavy Metal (as in the publisher, not the magazine) have allowed the creative team of Donny Cates, Eliot Rahal and Geoff Shaw to go back to doing what they do best: wacky superhero antics.
While most first issues are in a tricky place, trying to introduce the reader to a new world and cast of characters while creating enough interest to hook them into buying the next issue, this new “Paybacks” #1 needs to do all that while furthering the story from the previous series. Cates, Rahal and Shaw smartly made the decision to make this series follow almost directly on from the last series which means that all new readers are being thrown into a new world world and a new cast of characters that all have a built in history. Thankfully, the recap page (which is, for once, essential reading to set the stage for the story itself) and the use of the Matador as something of an audience avatar character early in the issue means that no reader should be lost. This allows Cates, Rahal and Shaw to dive pretty directly into the story and begin to ramp things up in a way that usually takes comics more than a few issues to do.
What’s interesting about this new first issue of “The Paybacks” is that it’s less interested in spoofing superhero comics and more interested in telling its own established story. That makes for much more dramatic storytelling than we saw in the previous Dark Horse series and shows just how versatile storytellers these creators are. I noted in my previous review that the reason Geoff Shaw’s artwork worked as a satire on superheroes is that it felt like it would work perfectly in a straight laced superhero story. That’s pretty much the case here as a large portion of the book deals with a Superman figure in the story being attacked by a supervillain and while the end result is much more grisly and gory than you’d expect from DC or Marvel, Shaw knows how to work with superhero action.
Shaw’s angular style utilises a very sharp linework that, when the action kicks off, employs generous use of cross-hatched shading and speed lines. Not only does this give Shaw’s linework a lot of depth in and of itself in the action scenes, but gives a sense of grandeur to the action. What little we see of the superhero “fight” (because, honestly, it’s more like a back alley beatdown) feels epic and bloody in a way that the previous “Paybacks” series wouldn’t have gone near. Shaw’s artwork is coloured by Dee Cunniffe, who brings a very understated palette to the book. The linework is already so over-the-top and raw with a scratchiness to the shading that keeping the colours muted for most of the pages brings a necessary grounding. Cunniffe’s colours only really start to match the intensity of the linework in that superhero beatdown, bringing in shocking red hues to punctuate the startling violence it portrays.
Continued belowPerhaps the only downside to the new “The Paybacks” #1 is the fact that the new focus on dramatic storytelling and building of the world of the comic means that the humour that made the original first series stand out is largely absent here. Things are played fairly straight throughout which makes it feel almost like any other superhero comic. Things like a van that’s bigger on the inside being the team’s base of operations start being commonplace fairly quickly and then one has to wonder what really makes “The Paybacks” stand out. For me, just seeing it back in print was good enough, but I do worry that past this issue the series will fall in line with every other non-DC and -Marvel hyperviolent superhero book like “Invincible”, anything written by Mark Millar or even stuff like “Irredeemable”. I certainly hope that Cates, Rahal and Shaw can inject some of their old humour back into this new series moving forward lest it begin to feel stale.
Overall, though, it’s fantastic to see “The Paybacks” return. This creative team gels just as well as they did before and it’s like they never missed a step. While I do mourn the absence of the humour that really made the previous series such a fantastic read, seeing these creators tackle a more straightforward superhero tale is worth a read by itself. Clearly Heavy Metal have seen something in these creators to bring the series back to life and if they can make it past four issues this time I hope we’ll see this evolve into a series everyone is reading.
Final Verdict: 8.8 – If you somehow missed the first series of “The Paybacks”, now’s your chance to jump aboard. If you’ve been mourning its ending, then time to rejoice at it’s return! It really is the comic for everyone.
