Review: Pigs #1

Co-written by former Marvel editor Nate Cosby and British expat (and Pittsburgh Steelers fan - w00t!) Ben McCool, Pigs is an espionage thriller about Cold Warriors who never stopped fighting the war. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a KGB sleeper cell was tasked to the island nation. They never left. Now it's 70 years later and the original operatives are old men and women. And so the mission falls to their children. The sleeper cell has been activated, but by whom? Why now? What is their mission? And who, or what, is the mysterious "White Russian" they're searching for?

Cosby and McCool have crafted a tightly wound, ticking-time-bomb of a story perfect for fans of historical fiction and cloak-and-dagger spy stories. Draped in the shady underbelly of Cold War history and the modern climate of fear and terror America now finds itself in, Pigs looks to be an action-packed and politically subversive story. It reminds me of Andy Diggle's woefully underappreciated The Losers, and not just because of the evocative cover art by Jock. (Future issues will feature covers by Francesco Francavilla, Amanda Connor, Humberto Ramos, Ben Templesmith and Becky Cloonan.)

The interior art is handled by comic book newcomer Breno Tamura (with the superb Christopher Sotomayor on colors), whose understated style meshes perfectly with the story's dark and realistic tone. Tamura's characters are all wonderfully unique and the story transitions smoothly from one panel to the next, which is not always an easy task with such a dialogue-heavy book. It's difficult to make two people sitting in a room having a conversation visually interesting, but Tamura pulls it off with ease. His action sequences are also engaging and full of energy.

With its alt-Earth history and intricate spy games, Pigs will have you hooked even before you reach the shocking cliffhanger. The final page is just one last tease to whet your whistle for issue 2.

Pigs #1 is published by Image Comics and will be in stores on September 14. Be sure to pester your local comic shop for a copy.

Preview: The Last of the Greats

Writer Josh Fialkov, best known for crime noir comics Tumor and Echoes, is jumping wholeheartedly into the superhero ring with his latest creator-owned title, The Last of the Greats, debuting in October from Image.

Illustrated by Brent Peeples, Greats is not your average capes and tights superhero book. In fact, labeling it a "superhero" book is probably a mistake, given that where there are heroes, you expect to find villains. Fialkov's superpowered world is not quite so black and white. The Last of the Greats is an exploration not so much of those who wield that power over us ordinary humans, but of humanity itself, and of what happens when our dependence on the Greats is exposed as the weakness it truly is.

In 1991, seven beings of immense power came to Earth in order to help us, to protect us. At first they were seen as benevolent gods, curing diseases and feeding the hungry. Humanity came to rely on the Greats and, as is so often human nature, quickly came to resent them.

We needed them. And we hated them for it.

(While the rest of the comic bears little resemblance, this initial premise flashed me back to the first couple years of The Authority, first written by Warren Ellis and then by Mark Millar, the turn-of-the-century superhuman series about superheroes determined to save humanity from itself, regardless of whether humanity actually wants to be saved.)

Cut to 20 years later. Earth is besieged by millions of unknown vessels. Six of the seven Greats are dead, murdered by those who would be saved. One Great remains, hidden away from humanity in what appears to be a giant Arctic fortress (of solitude).

Where his siblings sought to connect with us, to spread peace and harmony, the Last of the Greats chose isolation. He knew his brothers' and sisters' generosity would be spurned eventually. They were new, all-powerful, beyond our comprehension. The Last knew we would turn on them eventually. We always fear what we do not understand.

But in the face of such overwhelming odds, a group of humans, some who were seemingly handlers or ambassadors to the Greats, their most fervent advocates, sought out the Last, to beg him for the help his murdered siblings gave so readily. The conversation does not go ... smoothly. And help does not come without a price.

Joining Fialkov on this epic tale is artist Brent Peeples, whose clean, expressive artwork is a great complement to Fialkov's precise, evocative text. Each one of the Greats is distinctively rendered, as are the principal human characters. Peeples deftly conveys a wide range of emotions, everything from anger and jealousy to guilt and remorse, joy and gratitude. He can draw huge, cavernous backdrops and cityscapes as well as close ups and action sequences. His artwork will definitely be an asset to a story that's as much about ideas as it is about actions.

The first issue of The Last of the Greats sets the stage for what appears to be a wonderfully philosophical and complex series about just what it means to be human in a world given over to gods. How would you react if six Supermans came to Earth and systematically fixed everything to their liking?

There are also explosions and bloody deaths if that's more your speed.

The Last of the Greats #1 ships in October from Image. Be sure to pester your local comic shop to order you a copy.

Review: Echoes

With the Echoes hardcover debuting this week at San Diego Comic-Con, it seems like a good time to post my review of Josh Fialkov and Rahsan Ekedal's dark, horror-tinged thriller.

Film has long been the province for dark psychological thrillers, from Alfred Hitchcock's original classic, Psycho, to more recent fare, such as David Fincher's sublimely disturbing Se7en. And while there have been countless movies of equal or, as is more often the case, lesser quality than these, there is one realm where genuinely creepy thrillers are much less prominent: comic books.

Sure, there are horror comics full of grisly, blood-soaked death, much like the Saw and Final Destination series of movies, in which each iteration attempts to top the previous entry's imaginative killings, but these are generally death for death's sake. Murder as entertainment. Empty calories of the macabre. But far less often is there a comic book that so grips your psyche, so wreaks havoc on your sense of what's real and what's hallucination, and shakes to the core the very idea of narration that it keeps you awake at night with the lights on, unable to free yourself from the darkness you just ingested.

The bleakly addictive Echoes, masterfully crafted by writer Josh Fialkov and artist Rahsan Ekedal, is just such a comic book.

Echoes chronicles the tragic, downward spiral of Brian Cohn, husband and father-to-be, whose own father is a dying old man, a schizophrenic, who, lying in his hospital bed and wracked with Alzheimer's, seemingly confesses to being a monstrous child murderer.

Before he dies, in an apparent moment of lucidity, Brian's father desperately tells him about the box, and about the dead girls, "so many dead girls." He pleads with Brian to find the box and tells him the address, tells him the box is in the crawlspace under the house.

Understandably freaked out, Brian goes to the address his father told him. He tries to reassure himself that his father was just talking crazy, that it was the Alzheimer's or maybe his father didn't even really say any of those things. Maybe it was all in Brian's head.

You see, Brian is a diagnosed schizophrenic like his father, which immediately calls into suspicion everything we see through his eyes and hear through his ears. The conceit of an unreliable narrator has been done before, of course, but rarely has it been handled as deftly as it is here. Fialkov definitely did his homework, researching schizophrenia, its effects and its treatments in order to convey the disorder with both realism and honesty.

It must be a terrible thing, to be unable to trust the voices inside your head, to be constantly questioning the world around you, unable to differentiate between what's real and what's a chemical imbalance in your brain. Brian is constantly second-guessing himself, even when he takes his meds. He's recently been undergoing treatment in a hospital and he can't escape the fear that he'll be sent back unless he acts "normal." This is why he has to investigate his father's deathbed ramblings himself, instead of going to the police. If it turns out not to be true, that Brian simply imagined the whole thing, maybe they'll lock him away again.

What Brian finds in the crawlspace, unfortunately, is all too real.

Or is it?

That's the real beauty of Echoes. Because of Brian's disorder, it's difficult to know what's real and what he's imagining. There are moments throughout the book when you might think the whole thing is one big hallucination, that Brian is strapped to a bed in a psych ward, doped to his eyeballs. But Fialkov doesn't stoop to such a cliched, cop out plot twist.

In the crawlspace, under the house, right where his father told him it would be, Brian finds a box. And inside the box is proof that his father was telling the truth, that Brian wasn't imagining it.

And that's when Brian's life begins to fall apart.

Even during Brian's slow descent into madness, as he fights to keep the schizophrenia from overwhelming him, it doesn't come off as exploitative or cliched. Even as we start to think maybe, just maybe, Brian really is a serial kiddie killer, carrying on his demented father's work, we still feel sorry for him. To elicit sympathy for a man who may be a monster is difficult to pull off, but Fialkov manages it with ease.

Fialkov's work is heavily influenced by the noir style of storytelling, with a doomed protagonist unable to free himself from the web he finds himself caught up in, a web largely of his own making. Truly, the only thing Echoes is missing from the noir playbook is the femme fatale, the dangerous, seductive woman of mystery who lures our hero into a deadly situation. Brian is a happily married man, after all, whose caring, pregnant wife wants nothing more than for Brian to get well, take his pills and return to work so he can provide for his family.

Brian's schizophrenia, however, has other plans for him. Indeed, it is the schizophrenia that fulfills the role of femme fatale, whispering sweet nothings in Brian's ear, driving him to delve deeper into the mystery, making him question himself and, ultimately, destroying him.

Josh Fialkov's twisted tale is only half of what makes Echoes so effective. Without the haunting artwork of collaborator Rahsan Ekedal, the book wouldn't be nearly as effective.

Ekedal's art has a delicate, almost ethereal quality to it, as if Brian's world might crack and crumble to dust around him. Echoes is penciled in black and white, with a minimum of inking, more gray tones than black, which only adds to the ephemeral, ghostlike feeling that permeates the story. The uncertainty of Brian's world is beautifully rendered by Ekedal's light touch.

You can see the desperation in Brian's father's eyes as he pleads with his son to go to the house. The fear is etched on Brian's face as he clambers into the crawlspace, terrified of what he might find. And when Brian discovers a pile of old porn magazines, and thinks that they are what his father was talking about, his relief is palpable as he laughs and laughs, long and loud, sloughing off the fear like a second skin. Until the image shifts and pulls back and we see the bones piled high all around him, the dead girls his father told him about. And in an instant, Ekedal returns us to the foreboding horror we felt just a few panels earlier.

Echoes is a wonderful, must-read example of psychological horror done right, in any medium. Its slow burn of a mystery will keep you guessing 'til the very end, as you question Brian Cohn sanity right beside him, as he tries desperately to retain his already tenuous grasp on his splintering reality.