Comic Review: Seven Secrets SC Vol. 1 (BOOM! Studios)

BOOM! Studios releases a secret organization that is too good at keeping secrets for the sake of the world in Seven Secrets, the first volume of the graphic novel.

Ok, so I expect to have an all-out action comic like this one because this comic would be more interesting for the readers. The downside is that this comic has the darkest secrets that any other character can experience, and it’s about a boy who is about to overthrow the organization that hides their secrets from him. The comic is written by Tom Taylor and illustrated by Daniele Di Nicuolo. Tom is an Australian bestselling comic book author in New York Times, who is best known for one of his works on DC Comics and Marvel Comics like Injustice, Suicide Squad, X-men Red, and many of his Star Wars work. And I don’t need to remind you about the illustrator of this comic because he’s the same person who illustrated Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and you’ll think that this comic is related because his comics includes a lot of action scenes which makes you think that you’re reading another power rangers comic.

The front cover is more like looking at another cover of My Hero Academia, or one of the opening scenes of the second season of World Trigger, which it makes more to have as concept art of this cover. Here are the characters who are working under the organization and they seemed very serious in this scene. Funny thing is that this cover includes some cameos, like that person who looked like the plague doctor on the upper left side, does that mean that the virus reached that world as well? On the middle right, you’ll see a guy with silver hair who dressed like Raiden from Mortal Kombat, well almost if he gets to hear a hat and it would look just like him. And on the down middle side, you’ll see a woman wielding two swords who looks like a part-time worker, or a pirate. I don’t know where all that came from but it’s a surprise. There’s a quote from an American writer who wrote Batman, Scott Snyder quoted “Everything you could want from a comic book. Truly.” I don’t know what there’s more that I want, an interesting action comic, or some characters leaping through the air from one of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s illustrations, but the story is to be told.

The story starts when a narrator started mentioning secrets, secrets that one of the characters lived to die for. And that supposed to be some black magic that has the power to change the world. I don’t even know what the whole secret that everyone was babbling about, but everything is filled with magic and destruction in the present time. So the plot is that 15 years ago, one of the members was pregnant and somehow the woman was a product of forbidden love, meaning that the organization has no hesitation to fall in love and raise the child from their parents, so one of the higher-ups decided that the child will be taken and raised by the order of the seven. So the whole comic is given a lot of flashbacks of how the child was raised and turn him into a warrior for the order of seven, he barely talked to his parents, life is good. Just until that incident, and his father was killed by an assassin. Up until now, the boy has taken a lot of obstacles and kept his heavy burden to protect one of the seven briefcases from the beginning of the comic, for a story like this, it’s a no-brainer.

The story is…. don’t know how to say it, but it seems to be having much more common sense to have some carry a secret that they should protect with their lives. The world is a very strange place to know that there are a lot of things to be hidden from the enemy. The organization has a lot of heavy burdens to protect one of the powerful secrets that can change the fate of this world, and I’ve seen a lot of comics, shows, and video games with that plot before, because there are many stories that consist with some mythical weapons, accessories, rituals or spells that can change the world in a way, for the better or worse.

The art is not that bad, I consist having a comic related to power rangers, but this comic has a lot of action scenes because whenever I read through the comic, I noticed that the artist has a lot of experience of drawing these scenes in sword fights, martial arts and such. It’s more like power rangers I’d say, having something like this would be a learning experience for comic artists. Speaking of, when I looked at one of the pages of the comic on Instagram, there’s a post that shows the linework and inking that makes it clearer than the colored version. However, the only thing that the colored one shows is the scene where something is exploded through the background which seemed more dynamic, the illustrator and Tom focused on shading the whole half of the shadows as a warm color where the explosion happened. On every manga version, it tends to have more black and white with some dynamic scenes where something exciting happened, but I really do like the black and white version of the pages than the colored one, because what’s the point of all of this, it seemed that the top page of that scene shows that there is the warmer color of the explosion, and then it immediately takes you to a prison where the color became so dark and cooler where some guy is smirking. This comic would be much better with black and white than the color one because if they did, it would make it as a manga series than ever publishing on Boom! Studios. So Seven Secrets is a big adventure but a heavy burden to have just to keep a secret from everyone.