Bug Wars #1 //Review
Beetle are attacking the ant colonies. It’s a marauding force that seems more or less insurmountable as it encroaches onto a small civilization of ants. The beetles may be big, but they’re no match for the sheer flood of ants that are assembled to protect themselves in Bug Wars #1. Writer Jason Aaron launches a back yard tale of epic fantasy with artist Mahmud Asrar. Epic fantasy mixes with earthbound family drama in a fun opening for a whole new kind of genre mash-up that echoes some of the work of much that had come before it.
Somewhere beyond the back yard, Slade Slaymaker is helping his family move-in to their new home. There’s a hell of a lot of yard to be mowed. Slade’s going to have to get to it eventually. For now...things are a bit confused and confusing as Slade somehow finds himself launched down to the size of the bug war that’s going on in a lawn that he really SHOULD have mowed some time ago. Things don’t look good for Slade. He’s suddenly quite vulnerable to a problem that might have been easier if he had just gotten around to moving the lawn.
Aaron fuses Edgar Rice Burroughs-style swords-and-sandals fantasy with a starkly-contrasted down-to-earth family drama. The two ends of the story feel remarkably well-articulated. There’s a nice fusion between the two of them that feels pretty striking. The big reveal midway through the issue that there’s all of this contemporary drama going on above the epic fantasy war feels pretty intense the first time the page is turned from one world to the next. With the reveal fully realized, Aaron is going to have to work on pushing the narrative in other directions if it’s going to have anywhere near the kind of impact that the opening issue has.
Asrar draws a clear line between the world of the Yard and the the far more familiar world that Slade comes from. And while the Frank Frazetta-inspired visuals are really cool, there’s a strong connection between the world of the insects and the world of the humans. Asrar keeps the overall effect of the rendering consistent between worlds. If Asrar had done a bit more to distinguish the difference between the two worlds the incursin of one into the other might have been a bit more prominent, but it might have compromised the Asrar’s visually cohesive style.
It’s a nice opening with a lot of potential. The dichotomy between the two worlds is firmly established in the opening issue of a promising mini-series. Hopefully Aaron and Asrar can build momentum. This is kind of a tricky bit of narrative timing to negotiate. There’s a hell of a lot of action bursting through the first issue. A slowdown in action is inevitable in the second issue. Whether or not Bug War will live up to its potential will likely be decided by how Aaron and Asrar handle that slowdown.
