Barrier

Liddy is a rancher living on the Texas/Mexico border who’s determined to keep her land regardless of what threats she may be getting from local drug cartels.  Oscar is from Honduras and is heading north to escape a life that has been filled with heartbreak and terror.  Chance is going to bring them together in one tense moment.  Fate is going to keep them together as they’re forced to work with each other to survive an ordeal that neither of them had any reason to expect or even conceive of.

“Barrier” comes from the team who brought us the excellent “Doctor Strange:  The Oath” and “The Private Eye,” writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Marcos Martin.  If you’re a trade-waiter like me, then you’ve been waiting for this paperback edition for quite some time.  Originally serialized on Vaughan and Martin’s digital comics platform, The Panel Syndicate, it was given a single-issue release a few years back and that was it.  Now that it’s finally in a physical collected edition I get to see what I’ve been missing all this time.

Which turns out to be… fine.  Like last year’s “Spectators” from Vaughn and artist Niko Henrichon, “Barrier” feels like a victim of high expectations more than anything else.  It’s also a comic where your appreciation of it will likely hinge on how you react to the GIGANTIC twist served up at the end of the first issue.  I thought it was wild as hell and foreshadowed great things; yet, while I’m still comparing this to “Spectators,” I thought its sci-fi swerve and subsequent musings on life, the universe, and everything were more engaging.

That isn’t to say “Barrier” isn’t entertaining.  Vaughn expertly crafts Liddy and Oscar into being sympathetic protagonists who have their baked-in issues and differences, and he mines some satisfying drama in showing how the two manage to work past them.  Martin also gets to cut loose with some really wild designs after the first issue while still delivering an expressive cast – no small feat considering who the main characters are up against.  The man’s storytelling is also so accomplished that he not only makes the silent issue incredibly easy to follow, but the fact that Vaughn’s decision to have characters speak in their native tongues doesn’t derail the story is due  in no small part to how Martin is able to convey the necessary information through the characters’ expressions on the page.

So what’s the problem?  Well, for all that this story gets right, it really feels like a glorified B-movie when all is said and done.  I’m not trying to slight the form here as they can be thoroughly entertaining on their own terms.  It’s just that, coming from two of comics biggest talents in a story I had been waiting years to read, I was expecting more than what I got.  Hopefully anyone reading this won’t have that problem and will be able to enjoy “Barrier” for what it is rather than what they thought it was going to be.