Written by: Delbert Hewitt Jr.
Art by: Delbert Hewitt Jr. with Ross A Campbell and Juan Marquez (colours)
Published by: Hound comics
The Kings of The Wasteland is Delbert Hewitt Jr.’s latest venture into comics and marks the story of one of the last surviving dogs, Jacob, in a post-apocalyptic world that somehow resulted in all animals becoming anthropomorphic out to seek revenge on a gang of zoo escapees, lead by a tiger called King, who killed his family. Along the way Jacob meets up with a cat called Millie and a turtle called Gib who become his companions. The first issue just revolves around introducing all the characters and a couple of action scenes ensue.
Jacob immediately come off as the dark hero, with a violent past and wants to travel alone that you’ve seen hundreds of times; he’s Guts (Berzerk), Max (Mad Max) and Joel (The Last of Us) all rolled into one, although Guts seems to fit best. He just comes off as so miserably dark half the time I just feel any connection with him, one of his first lines is, ‘You don’t want to walk the path I’m on. There is only death on this path.’ I audibly groaned when I read this, one of the most cliched lines I had heard. If Jacob is Guts then Millie the cat (whose name isn’t given in the comic) is Puck (Berzerk), you know, that optimistic character that’s there to balance out the brooding hero and teach them that it’s ok to trust? The problem is, is that these two generalisations fit the two characters perfectly, there’s nothing else about them that’s really worth noticing and the conversations and relationship between the two is exactly what those two tropes would always have in any other story. Meanwhile, Gib is … just there, not much is told about him and he only appears halfway through in a fight with some lizard men.
The whole encounter with the Lizard Nomads is bizarre, they just appear and fight the group and that’s it, as if they only exist for that moment and this little nugget of weird can be brought out to everything else in this world, it doesn’t feel alive. This is likely because we know next to nothing about anything in the world but it gives the whole tale an empty, hollow feeling, as if nothing is at stake and you can imagine that once the heroes leave an area, that place just stops existing which leads to the reader feeling disconnected from the story. Speaking of disconnection, the art of the book is in this rather cool, cutesy style that wouldn’t look too out of place in a saturday morning cartoon; now, compare this against the setting and the gritty dialogue of Jacob and you get this bizarre contrast between the two that is only brought to the forefront even more when I realised that Delbert Hewitt Jr. also did the lineart when I initially thought that this was due to miscommunication between artist and writer.
At this point I realised that the whole series may just be a parody of post-apocalyptic tales that focuses on survivors going to any length to reach their goals. It would explain the contrast between the art and the writing, the cliched dialogue and character profiles, as well as the use of animals instead of humans as that brings the saturday morning cartoon style of the art to the attention of the reader easier. If it is a parody then I feel that it needs to push that angle more, Jacob’s dialogue does seem ridiculously rough but not enough to be obvious that it isn’t just another example of what it is trying to parody. It could help if Millie or Gib pointed out how ridiculous such talk of single-minded revenge and travelling alone is, although Millie does do that a bit at the start it comes off not strong enough again and just sounds like something Puck or Ellie (The Last of Us) said at the beginning of their journey too.
The book does have a few action sequences and each time the paneling feels off. A panel often feels like it should have been drawn a few seconds before or after the time that was chosen to draw or that there should have been another panel between it and the following one in order to make the action look smooth. Other than that though the worst issue of the art is just showing movement with the two most key examples being when Jacob does a backwards somersault to jump and grab onto a ledge above him but you can see, from the arc that is drawn of his jump, that it was impossible for him to make it, and the second being when Gib raises his staff to knock out a Lizard Man but his arm ends in a position it shouldn’t have if he swung from the position it was at in the previous panel.
Overall The Kings of The Wasteland has a long way to go if it wants to make a name for itself, it is an interesting enough premise but unfortunately the characters are all very bland in the first issue and the action comes off as clunky. Usually in these sort of stories it is the world that is the most interesting facet but we’re told very little of it here and the outlook on learning any more in the future looks bleak. The series may well improve as it continues on, if it finds its own flavour, but right now, in my opinion, it is just very bland and I often view that less favourably than something which was experimental but not well executed.