Albion #1
Originally presented at Comixtreme.com.
Quick Rating: Fair
Title: No Future in England’s Dreaming
England’s superheroes vanished 25 years ago… can anything bring them back?
Plot: Alan Moore
Script: Leah Moore & John Reppion
Pencils: Shane Oakley
Inks: George Freeman
Colors: Wildstorm FX
Letters: Todd Klein
Editor: Scott Dunbier
Cover Art: Dave Gibbons
Publisher: DC Comics/Wildstorm
Review: The newest “Alan Moore” project from Wildstorm (seems like he’s less and less involved in ‘em these days, what with his declaration that he’ll never work for DC again) is interesting enough, if not exactly groundbreaking. It is, however, something that just about any of us can relate to. When a young man who’s into old-fashioned comics recognizes a character on the streets, he’s suddenly swept away by a mysterious woman who seems to have the answers. Were those characters real? If so, what happened to them?
And can they come back?
The book actually reminds me very much of the lesser-known Roy Thomas classic Alter Ego (the comic book, not his magazine of the same name), which had a similar premise. The comparison is just a thematic one, though, as the story is quite different. The characters in this book are ciphers, not developed beyond a single character trait - a comic fan, a mysterious woman, a crotchety old antiques dealer, etc. One hopes that each of them will be developed and fleshed out as the series moves on.
There’s also a subplot involving inmates at a prison (or perhaps an asylum, or a freakshow for that matter), and we get a bit of the ol’ Watchmen device of showing us a comic-within-a-comic, which actually works fairly well in a project like this, since it’s a comic book about comic books, to a large degree.
Shane Oakley and George Freeman do a pretty impressive job on the artwork. Although the superheroes themselves barely appear in the issue, they do manage to give the book a feel of a superhero universe, with appropriately dramatic camera angles and the like. The short black and white comic-within-a-comic sequence is done in an entirely different style, but one that definitely works for what the writers intend at that point.
Is it a great comic book? No, not by a long chalk. But it’s an interesting one, at least thus far, and may be worth following for the next five issues to see where it all ends up.
Rating: 6/10
An archive of all my reviews is online at Evertime Realms.