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REVIEW - ALIMIGHTY Original Graphic Novel ( OGN )
Almighty OGN
Review by Dave Baxter, posted February 25, 2008
Pencils: Edward Laroche
Inks: Edward Laroche
Price: $10.00
Publisher: Edward Laroche
David Lapham and Eduardo Risso team up for a gorgeous new OGN, a fast-paced, action-oriented, sci-fi chase across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Oh…wait…no they don’t.
So…who made this thing? Edward…Laroche? Okay, well, what publisher? Edward…Laroche ?!? So, no company, just him, all on his own, a full 180-page OGN, stylish, slick, pro production values indistinguishable from any Oni or Viper Comics collection, but he just…made it? And…uh…printed it?
Yup: and he doesn’t even pretend he’s a “company”, but instead just puts out his first published work, Almighty, a book that follows a hired killer and the young girl she’s hired to save, and protect from an onslaught of other killers. “Fale” is this savior-warrior-woman’s name, a person of questionable origins, apparently having been raised inside “Zone 1”, a place where only the most impossible mutations of post-nuclear holocaust reside. Armed with abilities perhaps biological, perhaps cybernetic, she carries her young charge across miles of dangerous road, an ensemble of mad kidnappers at their heels, mercenaries, mutants, and more at their toes.
Almighty is a sweetly conceived first offering from Laroche, self-contained and wholly its own, yet set in a fully-realized future world, one that looks to be revisited and fleshed-out in upcoming sequels, starting with Remember Amphion (for which there’s a one-page preview ad in the back). Even better, Fale (the killer-for-hire) seems to be Laroche’s “heroine”, his protagonist, Remember Amphion being a book that appears to peer into her past, and so I’m assuming she’ll likely continue as the focus for the many books to come. Which is a good thing: Fale rocks ass.
Comics could use a few more strong, well-established female heroes, even if they are, more often than not, anti-heroes or femme fatales, and Fale, while not really much of a pure-bred heroine, swiftly proves a fascinating lead, complicated and yet simple-minded and therefore focused in her own way. Her past is tied to the unique aspects that make Laroche’s post-apocalyptic world worthwhile, and not just a rehash of a zillion other similar After-the-Fall clichés, but rather its own distinctive setting. She’s a matchless foil to the world’s amoral side, and a character whose dichotomies allow her to become more than just a hero in an otherwise self-serving future. Instead, she’s one of them, through-and-through, and yet she’s more, but only just, which is where the entertainment comes in.
Fale is good at what she does, but not unconquerable, and there’s plenty of others with the exact same qualifications as she, superior beings all. In Laroche’s world, Fale is literally one of the best, but the total number of “bests” is pretty damn high. So the action is breakneck, the threat level extremely elevated, and the cool factor through the roof, and despite it all, Laroche never loses the thread of the story or the characters’ own arcs in favor of simple eye-candy. The story of Almighty is a straight-forward thing, and kicks right off with action and ends with the same, but there’s a lot of nuance packed in-between, and even during, marking the book a complete and total package.
Laroche’s art is, as I sort-of joked about up at the beginning there, very similar to Eduardo Risso’s, fluid and dynamic and utterly appealing. There’s traces of Jason Pearson, Brian Stelfreeze, and Phil Hester as well, though any which way you cut it what it equals is an extremely beautiful and high-quality graphic novel. The action is glorious and perfectly rendered, the quieter moments suffering not a jot in comparison to the fight scenes, and the presentation is obviously one schooled on the best that modern comics has to offer, as it manages to match them, panel for panel.
With writing somewhere between Lapham and Brian K. Vaughn (the cross country chase scenes and the talking-head scenes interspersed reminds me, in their execution and quality, entirely of Y: The Last Man) and art straight from popular Image or Vertigo books, Almighty becomes both the title and description of this thickset gem. Affordable, with a higher page count, and frankly better than most $20 GN’s popping up out of the mainstream and even the small presses, I really can’t recommend you spend your money on anything else. Laroche may not be a name, as this is his first, and it doesn’t yet have penny one behind it for marketing purposes, but there’s no possible way talent of this nature can go on in this secluded vein for long. I’ve rarely read anything so good from a purely self-published source before, and the last time I did, the book was picked up by Slave Labor Graphics within the year. So mark my words, and think of this as an advanced limited edition.
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The only place to order Almighty for a meager $10 US is at Edward’s MySpace site: http://www.myspace.com/blackhalo51 Drop him a message and he’ll be sure to get a copy out to you. Preview pages are also available at the MySpace site.
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