Debris

It’s written and illustrated by two of Image’s hottest rising talents.  The reviews I read online were very enthusiastic about the first four issues.  I even saw comparisons to “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind” thrown about as well.  Now I know I’m framing this in the kind of way to suggest that everything here went horribly wrong in the final product, but that’s not the entire truth.  This story of a post-apocalypse world where the last city of humanity is threatened by creatures formed from the mechanical debris of the old world has a few things to recommend it.  Chief amongst these is the art from Riley Rossmo who nails the organic-yet-mechanical look of the monsters and has a great eye for the spectacle of the fights between them and the humans.

As for the writer, Kurtis J. Wiebe… well, his story is the functional equivalent of one of these “colossals” as it’s built almost entirely out of recycled parts.  Fortunately the familiarity of this story about a talented female warrior trying to save her people by finding the mythical land no one else believes to exist doesn’t really breed contempt.  The storytelling itself is brisk and the characters are genuinely likeable.  As for Maya, said female warrior in particular is a welcome mix of badass heroine and inquisitive dreamer, even if her design and color scheme borrows a bit too much from Nausicaa herself.  It’s a shame that her story ends so abruptly here after four issues because the scope of it felt much bigger than that.  I think they could’ve gotten a nice twelve-issue-maxiseries out of exploring the characters or their world.  At four issues it feels like Wiebe and Rossmo just did this to see if they could.  Still, it’s not bad overall and if some industrious executive in Hollywood wants to turn this into a movie or TV series, then the bar has been set low enough for them to possibly improve on the source material.