Written by: Nichole Phillips
Art by: Beni Lobel
Publisher: Titan Comics
As a fan of the show I was looking forward to diving in to this issue. To be honest, I have never been the biggest fan of “property” comics, but with the recent announcements of some great series ideas such as James Bond, Power Rangers, and Back to the Future, they kind of got me excited to pick this up.
My enthusiasm was short lived unfortunately, as I was “treated” to a subpar experience from start to finish. The comic is in no way the worst thing I have ever read, but to be a licensed series it would really help if the characters would have a likeness to their TV counterparts besides their similar visual appearance. The dialogue felt forced, the relationships felt fake, and the actual content veered so far from the show that I struggle to see how this issue was even approved by the producers.
The comic itself was quite confusing for the most part as at least 3 different things were going on. Obviously this being a first issue foundations had to be laid, but these strands will not be answered straight away so to introduce 3 elements of the series so quickly is slightly over the top in my opinion and this issue would have been better off having only followed two components.
The comic seems to be introducing some new mythos to the relationship between Red and Elizabeth which for me just didn’t sit right. If we are being honest, how many people are actually going to be reading this comic in comparison to the millions that watch the show, therefore to be introducing mythos all together seems like a poor choice of narrative. Surely, a better route would have been “Blacklister of the Month” while the mythos could just reassess what the show has already shown.
Speaking of the Blacklist, that was the best part of the issue, as the only actual intrigue of this issue came about through what was going on with the Blacklister. Apart from that I can’t really remember focusing on the rest of the copious amounts of redundant dialogue which takes up most of the pages. So while the dialogue was taking up these pages, I can’t really comment on the art except for the pretty explicit opening page of some guy getting his guts blown out of him.
You have probably guessed it already, but just incase you haven’t, I wasn’t a fan of this issue. As I said earlier, it is far from the worst thing I have read but besides having the same name as its TV show parent (as I would describe this series as the TV show offspring) it really is nothing alike and is truly disappointing for this fan right here!
