From Image Comics, a new title, a new #1: Indigo Children. What do we encounter in this Curt Pires-Rockwell White title? Is it jazzy, cool, and “Mood Indigo”, or does it colour too far outside the lines?
We start off with a prologue, where a presence appears at night in Egypt, at the Sphinx. THEN, we go five years earlier, and THEN we go to Chechnya in 1994. It’s airports and airplanes. Then, we RETURN to the five years earlier timeline. THEN a massive double-page spread of the logo and credits. And THEN we are in an interview room, place and time unknown, with pallets full of dialogue text jammed into 18 panels over two pages. That’s a lot of extra baggage for us to ‘carry on’!
It’s a pity, actually. After you read the book and take a few minutes to collect, unravel and review the story, it is a wonderful thing. Pire’s script with its supernatural or science-phenom-related subplots and characters are all really compelling. For example, there is a search for a child, with an international espionage sequence that is breathtaking. But the time jumps are disconcerting, distracting and dastardly. It’s like trying to watch a tv show when someone Elsewhere, Then and Now keeps playing with the remote.
Alex Diotto provides the line art with a no-nonsense grip on the essentials. It’s talking heads, big KABOOMS (letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou), and brilliant pyrotechnics (colours by Dee Cunniffe). It’s large panels and splash pages interrupted by pages of grid panels. It’s dramatically choreographed, visually entertaining. The poses and lighting are logical, imaginative, and attractive.
But the sequencing, the over-the-sky presentation of the logo spread, the repetition of key pages, the ever-changing locales and timelines of the script make this one wayy more puzzling than it needs to be. We want the rabbit ears adjusted, the remote fixed, the story clarified.
Image Comics, Indigo Children #1, $3.99 for extended (46 pages) of content.
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