Image Comics releases a graphic novel about a boy who looks up to a famous orphan as a post-apocalyptic superhero who brings hope to the people of England in Oliver on its first volume.
So take this comic for an instant and you have a guardian angel of the country who is willing to protect the people of this world. It’s almost like everyone worships the savior, but they still worship God for protection and gratitude. However, the destruction in England made it worse like The Walking Dead, the Pandemic comic, or the comic which the front cover made America disappear into thin air, which is more of a survival series. The story is written by Gary Whitta and illustrated by Darick Robertson, Gary is the one who is an award-winning screenwriter who wrote Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and The Book of Eli. And Darick is known best to illustrate Transmetropolitan, HAPPY! And The Boys. Both of them made this comic as a literary classic and turned into a futuristic twist of a story.
The front cover shows the main character Oliver who is leaping as if he’s flying like a bird. Surprisingly I hope that he would get wings even if he’s a guardian angel of the country. Oh and look at that, there are birds following him. Speaking of Oliver, there are similar ways of the main character, and if you look at the Space Boy series by Stephen McCrannie, you’ll see that one of the characters relates to another. The Oliver on Space Boy is actually anti-social and being isolated from school and the people around protected by the organization, but befriending with a girl named Amy, his feelings actually change. While this comic shows that this character shows that he’s soaring free like a bird, but he has some unique abilities that any other soldier can comprehend. There’s a quote who commented by Mark Millar and said “Gary Whitta slips effortlessly from movies and into comics with a terrific story and career-best art from Darick Robertson.” Well, I think what he meant that this comic almost came out as a film but he actually relates this comic as a movie because there are other survival films that could write this story in a way. Mark mentioned that Gary slips effort from making movies into comics, but after watching Rogue One, it seems that every movie can transcend its creation and turned something much greater.
The story starts as the most cliché moment of every comic book history, every sight in England is destroyed because of a war and there’s a woman wandering around looking for help because she’s pregnant and she’s in a verge of death in childbirth, however, the narration though, it seems that the writer is so poetic, he describes the sight of the country saying that the whole country is built by nature for the Queen against infection and the hand of war. However, it’s beginning to know how their lives are torn apart from the war and left them hanging out there with the dead. Meanwhile when she got to the city one of the children helped her deliver the child bird, but the cost causes her life. Later, the soldiers are having a hard time to decide who will take care of the child and chose the same soldier who looked like Sagat from Street Fighter, except his eyepatch is on the other side, who delivered the baby and named him Oliver. One day, when was grown up, the soldier showed him what caused the war, and nobody won except the whole country went genocide. And the cause of that genocide is the whole country created some humans who are killing machines that functioned only for combat, and the bombs that fell from the sky turned out to be poison that spread the air which makes blood-born humans become vulnerable, except the artificial humans survived. Until one day, Oliver knows the truth behind his childbirth and somehow one of the anti soldiers attacked them. One of the few pages and panels of the comic, you’ll see one of the most badass action sequences coming from Oliver’s tantrum over the truth and over the attack from the army. And at the end of the story, after such an incident of the war, his foster father died and left the soldiers so he could find his mother for vengeance.
The story is catching its very moments from Oliver’s childhood and turned what he becomes. Either way, the boy has some unique abilities that mostly everyone knows that he’s a freak. The humans who fought the war are becoming more menacing as it is right now, and the whole country left it scarred right at the face of the earth. However, the story came up with a twist of having the main character to learn the truth behind his mother and his childbirth. And it becomes more shocking for the readers that his origins are actually becoming more complicated than the storyline of Kingdom Hearts because his mother abandoned him after childbirth for lying about her death. It’s ironic by a chance, but the truth is out for Oliver and he wants to find his mother for his vengeance. The art is stunning which makes it more interesting to read which is coming from the same screenwriter who wrote “A Star Wars Story” movie. His illustrations are very massively good at the moment, but when you realize when you turn a few pages of the comic is Oliver’s moments, I’ve seen some of the characters like that since he has excellent agility to leap over the building of a castle. But when Oliver was young, he hopped really high which is accurate from Batman. And even when he’s fighting against his enemies, the rest of the comic never disappoints. His movements are like how I describe how my character’s actions and behavior should be, and I even had developed a backstory for my character. Oliver is one of the comics that provide such an ironic sequence and filled with a lot of action beyond this comic. If you rather want to read a comic about how a young boy survives in this world of pain, then this is for you.
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