FreeAgents #1 // Review
A squad of extra-dimensional soldiers is stranded on Earth. Their war was over. Now it’s coming to them. Sounds like a fun concept. What might be done to make it feel more...generic? Image Comics inadvertently explores this question in FreeAgents #1. Writers Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza roll through the motions on a big ensemble comic book that moves across the page courtesy of artist Stephen Mooney and colorist Triona Tree Farrell. The debut issue is not without its moments, but the fatigue of the superhero squad genre seems to bog the issue down immeasurably on all levels.
They’re in New Jersey. And they’re fighting a big mecha thing of some sort. Looks like something out of a 1980s anime or something. They’ve got powers. All of them. So they’re not going to have any difficulty betting the hell out of the thing. The news media is there to report on it...but they seem a lot more concerned about this new group of heroes than they are about the fact that a giant mecha thing with missiles just popped-up somewhere in the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty. And the group has concerns of its own. They’re not from around here...and they’re not alone...
Busiek and Nicieza have the nucleus of a really, really good idea. Displaced warriors from other dimensions could be a fun central group of heroes.The series opens-up with kind of a dull combat, though. Once the combat is over, the page is introduced to the personal lives of a group of displaced warriors, which really SHOULD be fascinating, but Busiek and Nicieza don’t manage to make them seem terribly interesting. They’re just these...people. And they’re going to be attacked again. And then...they’re going to win that battle too....
Mooney’s art is largely hit-or-miss. Some of what hits the page feels remarkably flat. This is okay in more muted moments, but there are big battles that are being fought and Mooney doesn’t always frame it on the page with much impact. Mooney does some really good work. Delivering complex emotion to the faces of everyone involved...and occasionally there IS some really impressively jarring action, but the overall rhythm and flow of action, motion and emotion has a tendency to feel very, very weak. Farrell’s colors add some depth and atmosphere, but it isn’t enough to bring any substantial coherence to the issue.
The premise is interesting. Busiek and Nicieza simply aren’t embracing the concept in a way that feels all that interesting. Theoretically the plot could have worked if the artwork felt a little bit more like it was in the spirit of Jim Lee or Todd McFarlane or any of a host of others who had done this sort of thing back in the 1990s, but it still would hav felt like a weak echo of what it needed to be in order to really deliver on the idea. If the writers can focus a bit more on the idiosyncrasies of this particular group of displaced paranormals....maybe there might be something in it...
