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Resistance #1
posted January 26, 2009
 

Creators: Mike Costa, Ramon Perez, Tony Avina, Wes Abbott, CP Smith
Publishing Information: comic book, DC/Wildstorm, 32 pages, 2008, $3.99
Ordering Numbers:

I feel bad about saying so because I'm sure the creators are trying really hard, but this is an awful comic. It's so bad and depressing and ultimately cynical that I actually considered closing this site upon reading it. This comic nearly broke me, and I've read some of the worst comics ever and lived through comics' self-inflicted 1990s recession. Maybe it just hit me at the wrong time? There's something about it that's so perfectly, exquisitely dull. It's not entertaining-bad, like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger throw rotary saw blades into people. I like entertaining-bad. It's boring-bad, like watching Jim Hutton read a magazine as he sits on unremarkable furniture. It practically punched me in the eyeballs to get me to look away. It took me three times through to realize that there was a back-up story.

Resistance seems to be a video game crossover set in an alternate Universe where some sort of aliens attacked and then slowly advanced on the nations of earth during what would have been the Cold War era (please don't make me read it again to double-check that). It's all cliches and dropped backgrounds and more cliches and more dropped backgrounds and jarring flashbacks and a confusing air battle which fails to communicate any sense of inner logic and all these little maybe-they're-first-time creators things like people talking when they're already out of the room or the depiction of physical action that would seem impossible given the visual information in the previous panel. In the end, all I could think is that the same month that multiple people in the industry have lost their jobs, WildStorm is asking $3.99 a copy for a story that should make anyone that reads it wonder if "making good comics" is going to be part of anyone's recession strategy.