“The Raid” #1

Witness a newcomer-friendly story for The Raid franchise with “The Raid” #1.

Cover by Ben Oliver

Written by Ollie Masters
Illustrated by Budi Settiawan
Colored by Brad Simpson
Lettered by Jim Campbell

An all-new story from the world of the martial arts masterpiece!

Written by Ollie Masters (The Kitchen) with art by Budi Setiwan (Rex Royd).

Go beyond the movie to discover the sinister truth behind Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man.

“Remember your first time with ‘Hard Boiled’? ‘Die Hard’? This is how it’s done – a clean, hard, constant hit of adrenalin.” – Empire

As far as fighting comics go, “The Raid” #1 is a standout, with Ollie Masters providing a particularly interesting writing style. Unlike other fighting comics, such as “Tekken” or “Mortal Kombat X,” “The Raid” seems to forego any overemphasis on plotting, with the primary focus being on a simple storyline of criminal conspiracy involving police in a prison.

Masters provides more focus on cataloguing individual injuries or identifying specific people, more using the writing to set a scene instead of to have much in the way of a complex conversation between any two people for very long.

That is not to say that the story is completely lacking. Through Masters’s minimal information on this post-film storyline, he helps to set the scene for the miniseries as a whole. While the overall story is not particularly complex, the judicious use of dialogue, which is concentrated into only a few scenes, gives the general impression of the entire story to come, and is more than enough for newcomers to the films to jump right in on the franchise as a whole.

The paneling used with the writing is of particular note, with multiple identical panels used to give the “slowed” impression of a strobe light at a nightclub, or to give a vague impression of time passing in a prison day by day without needing to say anything. While Budi Settiawan’s artwork makes beautiful use of those panels, the decision to use them was in and of itself very interesting.

Due to this limited focus on the words, Masters relies upon Budi Settiawan’s artwork to help tell the story a lot more than many other writers may have found necessary. Repetitive, or only slightly altered artwork, with a silhouette coming right after a clear picture of what someone looks like helps to show a passage of time, as mentioned above. Slanted artwork in certain fights help to showcase the chaos of a quick assassination on the part of those being killed. On the other hand, more standard rectangular panels give a better feeling of calmness.

As mentioned previously, the paneling is rather interesting, and Settiawan makes use of it to show varied perspectives and individual body parts, as if focusing a film camera instead of just illustrating a comic book scene.

Settiawan utilizes a worm’s eye view or a Dutch angle to show where apparent hierarchy lies, especially within the confines of Jakarta Prison. Furthermore, he makes use of the forefround and background especially well, such as in the closing pages to illustrate the bizarre juxtaposition between a prison cafeteria riot and two inmates sitting at their tables watching it all happen amongst the guards and the more hostile inmates.

Seeing as “The Raid” #1 is comic of a film famous for its intense fight scenes, Settiawan had his work cut out for him when it came to the way of illustrating those scenes. In order to showcase how violent hand-to-hand fights truly are, Settiawan utilizes panels within panels, giving an X-ray view of injuries varying from a shattered patella or ribs to a fractured jaw. For the battle with weapons, Settiawan instead focuses in on the impact of those weapons and the act of pulling them away, showing both the force needed and the effortlessness with which the assailants act. On the whole, this style of artistry is not unlike that used by Andrea Sorrentino’s work with violent scenes, with possible comparisons drawn to the likes of the latter’s “Green Arrow” issues.

Brad Simpson’s coloring does the rest of the work, complementing the action very well. Depending on any one scene’s action and tone, more than the individual participants, the colors have a variance that helps to get into the heads of a film viewer even more than a comic reader.

In times of relative calm, cool colors reign supreme, from an aqua shade on the actually darker inmate uniforms to a blue or darker grey. On the other hand, Simpson portrays rage and quick, brutally violent murders or injuries through the use of red tones instead of whatever colors the participants actually are wearing.

At times, even individual people are viewed with a red tint, while others are instead in the browns, grays, or whatever other colors they are actually wearing, whether in the immediate aftermath of an attack or during the attack itself in order to show the intense, hostile emotions at work or feigned on the surface. Even imminent violence sometimes has a gradient of red wash across it, as if the scene itself is anticipating the blood to come. Intense violence sometimes has absolutely no background color whatsoever, providing even more focus on the participants by way of having them on a white backing.

In all, while “The Raid” #1 is a relatively simple comic in terms of its plot, the focus on its art and colors helps to hold it above many other combat-based comics without keeping newcomers to the film franchise in the dark.

Final Verdict: 8.0– A brutal fight comic with interesting colors and a relatively simple story, “The Raid” #1 is interesting and newcomer-friendly.