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Review: Special Forces #1
Special Forces #1
Writing/Art by Kyle Baker
Published by Image Comics. $2.99 USD
I don't even remember preordering this comic. I think I just went quickly through the solicitations online, saw Kyle Baker had something new, and added it without even reading the copy. So it was actually a nice surprise to see it come in, and to discover how good it is.
The cover is very good in a Mad Magazine way, like something Mort Drucker would do if he painted. It lets the reader know there's going to be a humorous bunch of misfit soldiers, but that there will also be sex appeal in the form of a scantily clad female in the same platoon. And both of these things are kind of true, but there's more going on in this book.
The splash page lets you know this as well, as an African-American soldier gets his head blown apart and the white female soldier narrates, "The black guy dies first." This could be a comment on how expendable minorities are in war movies, or it could be Baker letting readers know we're in for a story that isn't going to be about race. Either way, it's a shocking image, and kind of funny.
The story is about how this misfit troop was pulled together by a sergeant needing to fill his recruitment quota by any means necessary. And so we have a going-nowhere teen sexpot, Felony, the autistic Zone, who is unstoppable if you give him a to-do list...and a few others who are mainly just names, because they're going to be killed quickly. Baker has taken the recruitment of autistic story from real life and constructed an action-packed satire around it. Except it's not really that much of a satire. The events depicted here are pretty believable, and Baker doesn't insult the readers or our own armed forces in Iraq by making a laughing matter out of a firefight. Sure, there's some mordant humor that's more of a survival instinct, but Baker respects his character, Felony, and this is really about her becoming a leader and learning to work effectively with the unknowable Zone in order for both of them to survive. It's funny, sure, but it's also really exciting.
Ironically, though so much of the book is BIG--explosions, sound effects, tits--Baker uses a tight grid with lots of white border most of the time, and lots of roomy word balloons, but he knows how to construct a page. The book seems to be a high class homage to the old EC war comics, especially in the use of bright colors that change from panel to panel. It's in the flashbacks, when Felony was just a high schooler trying to stay out of jail, that Bakers uses muted colors for the backgrounds. It's a good effect, implying that for all her feistiness Felony doesn't really come alive until she's in combat. Only in the use of some sort of retouch effect used to wipe away color to imply rising smoke did I think Baker erred with technology, but he'll probably figure out how to do that better next time. I don't buy a lot of floppy first issues anymore, so it would be unfair for me to call this one of the best of the year, but I loved it and will definitely be continuing with the story.
Writing/Art by Kyle Baker
Published by Image Comics. $2.99 USD
I don't even remember preordering this comic. I think I just went quickly through the solicitations online, saw Kyle Baker had something new, and added it without even reading the copy. So it was actually a nice surprise to see it come in, and to discover how good it is.
The cover is very good in a Mad Magazine way, like something Mort Drucker would do if he painted. It lets the reader know there's going to be a humorous bunch of misfit soldiers, but that there will also be sex appeal in the form of a scantily clad female in the same platoon. And both of these things are kind of true, but there's more going on in this book.
The splash page lets you know this as well, as an African-American soldier gets his head blown apart and the white female soldier narrates, "The black guy dies first." This could be a comment on how expendable minorities are in war movies, or it could be Baker letting readers know we're in for a story that isn't going to be about race. Either way, it's a shocking image, and kind of funny.
The story is about how this misfit troop was pulled together by a sergeant needing to fill his recruitment quota by any means necessary. And so we have a going-nowhere teen sexpot, Felony, the autistic Zone, who is unstoppable if you give him a to-do list...and a few others who are mainly just names, because they're going to be killed quickly. Baker has taken the recruitment of autistic story from real life and constructed an action-packed satire around it. Except it's not really that much of a satire. The events depicted here are pretty believable, and Baker doesn't insult the readers or our own armed forces in Iraq by making a laughing matter out of a firefight. Sure, there's some mordant humor that's more of a survival instinct, but Baker respects his character, Felony, and this is really about her becoming a leader and learning to work effectively with the unknowable Zone in order for both of them to survive. It's funny, sure, but it's also really exciting.
Ironically, though so much of the book is BIG--explosions, sound effects, tits--Baker uses a tight grid with lots of white border most of the time, and lots of roomy word balloons, but he knows how to construct a page. The book seems to be a high class homage to the old EC war comics, especially in the use of bright colors that change from panel to panel. It's in the flashbacks, when Felony was just a high schooler trying to stay out of jail, that Bakers uses muted colors for the backgrounds. It's a good effect, implying that for all her feistiness Felony doesn't really come alive until she's in combat. Only in the use of some sort of retouch effect used to wipe away color to imply rising smoke did I think Baker erred with technology, but he'll probably figure out how to do that better next time. I don't buy a lot of floppy first issues anymore, so it would be unfair for me to call this one of the best of the year, but I loved it and will definitely be continuing with the story.
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