Writer: Dan Abnett and Ian Edginton
Artist: Lui Antonio
Publisher: Boom Studios
Price: $2.99
Boom Studios have done brilliantly with their initial releases, bringing television and film talent to comics and tackling various genres that get missed usually. This represents their first foray into licensed comics, taking on the Warhammer 40,000 universe from Games Workshop. Up until recently Workshop had published their own comic, but this never really broke them any ground outside of their usual consumer base and given the nature of the Warhammer 40,000 setting its easy to see why. This is a universe where war is prevalent and where the human race is ruled over by a Emperor who has become confined to a throne which keeps him alive. The main troops for the humans are the Imperial Guard - your bog standard soldiers - and the Space Marines - a group of genetically modified zealots in power armour. Now one of these groups is identifiable with and the other is the focus of this comic.
Visually Space Marines look interesting, though they can also be visually indistinguishable from their fellows. They are also single minded offering no other stories to be told with them outside of war stories. Damnation Crusade has attempted to get past this by telling a rite of passage for one of the three characters it focuses upon, but even with a younger character it is difficult to tell this young skin head character from that slightly older skin head character next to him. The comic itself does not help by opening with a cool sequence where a marine sheds his helmet, tells us his name and invites his opponents to come get him. For a start he looks like one of the later characters introduced, but that’s not the main problem. Apart from looking cool does this sequence have any logic behind it? It’s the Hollywood way of doing things, but in the dark future why does someone not just shoot him in his unprotected head? On first read this story seemed to be a series of sequences that had little to do with a narrative and merely existed to look cool. Reading it again and the narrative is there, but there is no character to emphasise with. I mean you could emphasise with the Space Marine, or the trainee Space Marine, but probably not the Dreadnought - ie a former space marine kept alive inside a giant robot.
As for adversaries we are promised a who’s who of some of the more exotic alien races, but based on the appearance of one in this issue what this means is that there will be no story connected to the conflicts, but rather we will be shown snippets as part of the narrative. This hardly helps connect you to the lead characters.
For new readers I think this will be confusing. For Warhammer 40,000 players it may well not be satisfying either. Half the writing team, Dan Abnett, has done a lot of work for Games Workshop, including the high adventure tales of the Tanith Imperial Guard, but he has also had problems in keeping continuity straight and using the established background. Neither Abnett or Edgington are strangers to comics writing so the question has to be asked why this first issue feels so stilted? The flow is just not there. The art carries the book so far and even this is not without problems. A very odd sequence halfway through has the marines getting ready for combat and they all click their guns in a manner that makes no sense whatsoever.
Good stories can be told with this universe, but this is a misstep as a first comic for a new franchise. Better to have a title with a cast that could be more identified with and a story that gave us more than just war. Abnett has done better than this with his novels in the same universe so there is hope that Boom will be allowed to get it right next time.
Mark Peyton – has a MA in History and Research from the University of Hull specialising in the Hundred Years War. In a complete departure from that he now runs communications and membership for a UK based Trade Union as well as being a part time writer/journalist.
He is a founding member of Millarworld acting as a moderator and as an editor for Fractal Matter.