New Champions #1 // Review
Somewhere in San Francisco a couple of guys in suits made off with an entire vault. They are thieves who call themselves the Brothers Grimm. They’ve seen in and out of prison quite often, but they’ve always managed to. get out and find another score...only to run-in with another super-powered crimefighter. But...they should be relatively safe in Frisco, right? There aren’t any super-powered crimefighters in San Francisco are there? Actually...there are...as they find out in the opening pages of New Champions #1. Writer Steve Foxe writes the opening chapter of a fun new series with artists Ivan Fiorelli and Ig Guara. Color comes to the page courtesy of Arthur Hesli.
Liberty’s the leader...sort of. She’s a an athletic tech head who has worked with bigger heroes in the past. Here she’s working with a bunch of next-generation kids who are all just trying to establish themselves. There are younger variations of Moon Knight, Captain Marvel and a mysterious girl with mysterious powers. The Brothers Grimm are going to be easy. Dealing with their parents? That’s going to be a little bit more difficult. And then they are summoned to be attacked by a group of zombie vikings and things get a little dangerous.
It’s always difficult to manage the right kind of edge for a teen superhero. Thankfully, Foxe seems to have a solid handle on how it is that these things work. The challenges to treat them just like normal adults, but to present them in a way that clearly marks them as being not quite adult yet. Foxe clearly has them not entirely aware of the danger that they're actually in. And really this is something that's just a lot of fun for them. A group of friends.
Fiorelli, Guara and Hesli have a very slick presentation. Clean lines and sharp colors fill the page in bed allows plenty of room for nuanced, dramatic close-ups while also pullin-back into big and impressive moments of powerful action that shoots across the page. Hesli imbues the page with a great deal of atmosphere that gives each location its own energy and intensity. It looks remarkably well-thought-out. FIorelli and Guara do a really good job of making teens look like teens even as they fend-off an army of zombies and wield ridiculous amounts of power.
There is great potential for a serious coming of ages sort of story. And it's entirely possible that they could manage to pull it off in a way that would be really interesting as character progression happens over the course of several years. Of course, it's going to take quite a while to get into the right kind of momentum to be able to do this. And so it's going to be kind of a challenge to see how things will come together with respect to it. However, there is a general feeling that Foxe nd company might have the right momentum.
