Fireblast, Adventures in the 30th Century #0
Publisher: Masterpiece Comics
Writer: Ace Masters
Artist: Nichx
Letters: Michelle Fiorucci
Editor: Barb Caffery

17 pages

Rating: 1 out of 5

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Premise: Mack Fire is all set to open his private investigation firm when an assassin starts taking pot-shots at him.

Synopsis:

Mack Fire is an adventurer who has decided to open his own private investigation agency. He’s got a holographic assistant named Perfect A, and all seems right until someone hand-delivers a bomb to his door. Further attempts are made on his life, which really puts a damper on the whole entrepreneurial thing.

Mack escapes from certain CERTAIN death, finds out an assassin is after him. He is visited by the guy who hired the assassin who tells him that the assassin was supposed to kill some OTHER Mack Fire who looks just like our Mack Fire. Oops. He offers him the most powerful handgun in the galaxy (worth 3 million!) to make amends.

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Review:

If you saw the rating above, you can probably guess that this isn’t going to be a good review, but let me say a few things first. I applaud Masters and company for giving it the old college try. They are clearly very serious about publishing and distributing their work and making a real attempt at it, which is more than can be said for many many people. Their web site and promotional materials are certainly indicative of their wish to be serious comic book publishers.

However. The book has been submitted for review, and the series is solicited through Diamond, so there is a certain level of quality that I would expect to see, but this book isn’t quite where I’d like to see even a first-time publisher be. It’s just very very rough. Masters and Nichx have clearly put a lot of their heart and soul into this book, but it still needs a lot of work. I can only hope that instead of being a discouragement, that they’ll take these comments and allow them to inform their work in the future, because it’ll only get better by seeing the flaws and working them out over time.

First of all, let’s talk about the general feel of the book. We’re supposed to be seeing the world of the 30th century (900 years in the future), but the only taste of the future that we have are flying cars. Some things that I would NOT expect to see in the 30th century, but which are present here include the QWERTY keyboard, Mack’s mini-tower desktop computer, a standard pool table, writing ink in a jar, and a Bic-style ballpoint pen.

The story is pretty shaky. After Mack gets bombed, shot at, and bombed again, he’s visited by a plot device that just hands him the most powerful handgun in the galaxy as a way to apologize for an incompetent assassin. This is an assassin who is so incompetent that I’m almost positive that he was either an Imperial Stormtrooper or a Mad magazine character in a previous life (definitely Black Spy - he’s even got the hat).

The dialogue is also pretty rough - but not as bad as some books I’ve reviewed. Some panels have far too much dialogue for the space available - especially the conversation with the colonel. The dialogue could be edited down - eliminating at least 10% of the words and still get the meaning and mood across.

Nichx’s art can stand to be better as well. The backgrounds are sparse with very little detail. The coloring looks flat and lacks consistency. Supposedly inanimate objects move around in space from panel to panel. The characters often seem to be awkwardly posed - kind of like when I used to stand my G.I. Joes up to do battle. It probably comes down to needing a better grounding in anatomy - and something that will only come with time. I’ve poked around Nichx’s website. He’s much better than this book shows. He’s a decent colorist, and a passable penciller, though even on his site his characters are often too tall and elongated - especially through the neck and upper torso - and occasionally seem to have awkward joint and limb placement.

I think this is going to be my first-ever comment about lettering, and I’ve got three of them. The lettering of Perfecta’s dialogue is distracting. I would assume that in the 30th century, a hologram’s synthesized voice would sound equivalent enough to a human voice that it wouldn’t need to be differentiated by a different font. Also, in the standard font, the “A” has too much space in front of it. As a result, words like “PERFECTA” OR “REPAIR” look more like “PERFECT A” and “REP AIR.” Finally, some lines break unnecessarily in the middle of the word. The book is lettered on a computer, so it wouldn’t be too much effort to adjust balloon size to avoid that sort of thing.

And what would my first comment about lettering be without a first comment about editing? There are some typos and grammatical errors that slipped through the editorial process (let’s instead of lets - advanture instead of adventure - acess instead of access). I hope that sort of thing was caught and fixed in the later issues that were actually solicited through Diamond.

Clearly, the book needs a lot of work.  I’m crossing my fingers for these guys that this is a case of the preview-issue blunders.  I hope that they’ve already seen the stuff that I mentioned for themselves and are improving on it as they continue the book’s run, but unless I see some evidence of improvement, I can’t really recommend it.