Comic Review: Crossover #1 (Image Comics)

Donny Cates’ new title, Crossover, pulls us into a world where fictional comic characters are very very bad.

“WHAT IF” comic book superheroes came to life? Go ahead, imagine real, for-real superheroes beating each other senseless, wrecking national monuments, tearing apart the globe. Or at least, America-centrically speaking, tearing up the city of Denver in the state of Colorado. A mess, a great big mess. On January 11, 2017, for example. There ought to be a law!

And now, in a small place called Provo, in the state of Utah, it’s gotten real for our lead character, named Ellipses (yes…), who works in a comic book store. There are people violently protesting in front of her store. Otto, the cranky store owner, has poor social skills. It seems like a pot boiling over. Civil disobedience. Impatience, impertinence, and all other kinds of rudeness. Drama city!

It plays to the comic book fan. To our vanity. We read comic books, and we go to comic stores. What if?

Seeing as how this is a first issue, here are my typical expectations: I need to understand the setting. I want a clear sense of the characters, and what they represent. What is their back story, where are they going, what are they dealing with? In other words, what will the storyline consist of, who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? What will my $4 give me, and in what flavour?

Artist Geoff Shaw pulls it off, this conceit of comic heroes and comics within comics and a comic about that, and the whole ‘comic within’. The drawings are strong, the situations are clearly rendered with well ‘fleshed out’ people. Dee Cunniffe’s colours add the right amount of ‘fantasy-within-fantasy’, layer upon layer of fabrication.

My sense is that this story, as myopically narrow in geography as it is, (what about the other 96% of the world’s population?) could become interesting in future issues. I wanted more, to be honest. But the concept has plenty of potential to explore. Let’s look for issue two… to be continued!

Image, Crossover #1, $3.99 for 26 pages of content