New World Order is a new ongoing series from the Shadowline imprint under Image Comics. While I have only received the first issue, I will be sticking around for the next few, but I am being generous, as the premiere installment was slow-paced, muddled, and only marginally promising.
I would love to give you a brief overview, but that's impossible - New World Order starts off in one direction with one cast, then quickly diverges into another with a new cast, then apparently finds its stride without bothering to include the audience! As best I can tell, New World Order starts around the Dawn of Man and we get involved sometime in the near-future. We meet a slew of characters we are led to believe are central to the book before they are left behind in a confusing series of jump-cuts and fast-forwards until we come to a group called the Third Army, which the last pages explain are actually us, the readers! I guess one or more of the characters involved in this group are from the cast we were introduced to at the start, but I can't say for sure.
New World Order is an ambitious project, with characters, themes, and ideas based on real-world counterparts and a healthy overdose of speculation. Imagine if all the Weekly World News stories were true - all of them! - and the conspiracy theorists were right, then subtract all of the inherent wackiness and over-the-top humor, and you have New World Order. And NWO pulls-out all the stops - it's all here and it's all real: secret messages on our currency, powerful illuminati controlling things from the shadows, aliens and alien technology, mutant monsters controlled by the Church and government agencies... it's a promising premise, but one that's been done better - even by Image!
NWO is not bad, but it isn't really good, either. With such promising material, it may just be a weak start - they took on too much and didn't have enough room to flesh it out - but it is a mundane execution, regardless. The text pages at the end are helpful but disappointing, since the creators chose to use them to introduce us to the real-world counterparts on which the book is based, instead of furthering the in-book concept. It comes off as slightly lunatic, which almost works, since you get the idea that the creators might just believe half the shit they're writing and that makes it a bit more exciting - like having rough sex with someone who has short-term memory loss ("What 'safety word'?"). These should have been pages from some fictional book or pamphlet - or better yet, tabloid clippings collected into some Third Army member's scrapbook o' batshit crazy; they really missed a great chance, since the major failing of the book is their inability to fit such a massive backstory into the pages they had available.
The dialogue is good and, true to its source, rife with obscure slang and "code," as though we are eavesdropping on real conspiracy theorists speaking their own language (which, as the final pages suggest, we may well be); it's cryptic nonsense which suddenly gives way to detailed diatribes - just like its real-life counterparts' rants. But there is more to writing comics than just good dialogue and NWO fails to let the reader in on the story and action. It is tantalizing, but so intentionally dense that the audience gives up about halfway through. When it does make sense, it is so trite and predictable that you almost wish it had remained obtuse.
The art is not good... I don't really know a better way to put it. Like many Shadowline books, it is mundane and strikingly staid; it looks like the comics you drew in highschool and thought were so good until you came across them a few years ago and realized that, while not bad, they most certainly were not "as good as what [was] on the stands." Little tip: if all your content is comprised of mid-shots and close-ups, use dynamic paneling and learn what the word "composition" means! Another tip: heavy dialogue does not mean all your panels have to be close-ups and medium shots; don't let the writer draw the book! But, all this aside, the quality of the art itself is just plain... not good.
New World Order is a promising start and premise with a mediocre delivery. While you could do worse, at this price, Shadowline should do better.
© C Harris Lynn, 2008
1 comment:
I misspoke: NWO is actually a 3-part mini-series which my pull-list company lists as being "inactive" (delayed, possibly canceled).
I have a slew of #1 issues to review for you over the week, and most of them are better than this one, I'm pleased(?) to say.
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