Over the past few months I have slowly become more and more drawn to Image, Aspen and Top Cow comics. Maybe it’s because they aren’t the normal and their characters don’t conform to the DC or Marvel formulas but different is good. Sometimes.
Infinite is a new comic brought to us by Image comics and written by Robert Kirkman.
Many of you will know Kirkman for a number of other titles such as The Walking Dead, Marvel Zombies or recently reviewed Super Dinosaur. He is also the newest partner of Image as well so he carries a fair bit of weight in many circles.
With Infinite being new, you have to look at what it is bringing to the market.
The story is very reminiscent of a number of arcs we have seen running through the X-Men and the more I think about it, the more it echos back to themes and stories such as The Age of Apocalypse, or more importantly the efforts taken to try and prevent it.
The story opens with an attempted assault on an implied dictator watching over the current world’s order. As with any regime there will always be opposition and this introduces our main character. As it draws to a close on this part of the story, without giving story away, we leap back in time.
Now whereas Hickman, with The Red Wing, protected his story against paradoxes, Kirkman has stayed firmly in the camp that believes that the actions of the past effect those ahead of them, and Bowen embarks on a mission to start the revolution early thus creating a race against time with his younger self as a counterpart.
The scripting is well written to the point of being passionate, but it hasn’t covered over, or at least delayed, the feeling that this has been done before in a number of different guises. I still can get over the fact that by working the story in the way that he has, Kirkman has created once massive paradox loop that needs some form of twist or just something to break it so that it can move on and grow.
For the comic Kirkman has collaborated with Rob Liefield whose style is quite distinct. Everyone is oversized yet toned. The men are muscular and well formed with a plethora of their own personal storage pockets and pouches. Most notable examples of this would be Cable or Deadpool, which of course Liefield co-created. I’m not actually sure that he can draw a male figure which doesn’t push the realms of stitching on a top. The other thing that made me chuckle is that there is only one resounding word for the very first panel in this comic and that word is “Codpiece”.
Saying that, the artwork is full of fine detail with attention paid to all of the image including the backgrounds. With the oversized figures there isn’t always much to fill in but that’s not to say that it ever feels crowded.
For a new comic reader I think that it would be a good one to read and follow but on this occasion Image hasn’t hit the mark for me.
Matt Puddy always laughs at the word "Codpiece".
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