The Cold War hysteria may have died, but the embers still burn.
What They Say:
The story centers around a second-generation KGB Cuban sleeper cell, activated & assigned to overthrow the U.S. Government through a series of kidnappings, assassinations and acts of terrorism. But why has the call come now, 50 years after the original cell last heard from Mother Russia?
The Review:
One of the things I like about digital comics is, as dangerous as it can be, it’s easy to browse the virtual bookshelf at any time of the day. And when you see a recommendation come across, an extra plug somewhere about how a book might be intriguing, it doesn’t take much to pop open a window and grab a copy. With some plugging on Twitte by the folks at Comixology, the concept of Pigs was enough to grab me for the first issue here to see what it’s all about. Having grown up and come into consciousness about politics and foreign policy during the final ten years of the Cold War, films and books at the time dealt with it a lot and experiencing films going backwards brought a lot more of it to mind as well. While it’s fallen out of fashion for obvious reasons, it does crop up in interesting ways with all sorts of media over the years since the end of it and Pigs plays to that pretty well.
Taking place largely in the present, Pigs spends a good bit of its time working back and forth in the timeline to tell its story and it mostly works effectively. What hampers it is the lack of names at times, such as the old woman that only gets called Mama in the end as we see some of the scenes from earlier. In the present, she’s being interrogated about the activities that happened back in 1962 when during the whole Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Soviet Union sent in weapons and more to set up missiles there as well as something very different. That different was an agricultural team, something that fell through the cracks over the years as it was the one element that according to intelligence, didn’t make it back on the boat when the whole thing ended. That’s given the authorities the clue that a Cuban sleeper cell exists, though the woman laughs it off and avoids being pinned down about anything, going on about how any such thing would be full of old men now considering it’s been fifty years since then.
While that unfolds, the back and forth shows us the truth of the matter, as seemingly the last of the old men died but what they all left were their children, now adults themselves. And they’ve kept to what their parents did, having been brought up on the Cold War mentality and keeping the mission in mind after all these years. With the death of seemingly the final parent of it all, they’re keeping everything in place but there’s tension amongst them all. What changes it all though is the sudden arrival of a mysterious stranger after the funeral who provides the mission codeword that activates them. The mission itself isn’t seen in detail, but we get the brief lead-up to it and a very good shocker with the last panel that definitely sells it and essentially tells me that I really need to come back for the next issue to see if they can capitalize on it.
Digital Notes:
This Comixology edition of Pigs contains the main cover as seen with the print edition with no variants or other extras included.
In Summary:
While the creative side of Pigs is a completely unknown to me, the book itself works very well and provides for a good concept that starts well even if I’m not a huge fan of the overall execution with the way it jumps back and forth. It’s not a gimmick here, but sometimes more linear storytelling does work better. The Cold War angle works very well in giving us something familiar, at least to older readers, yet different at the same time since so many books of this nature have gone a different sociopolitical route in the last ten years when it comes to threats. And while it’s justified in its own way, there’s something different about going back to this particular well since it capitalizes on old fears, a second generation of it rising that hasn’t been thought about and some actual distinct success that’s happened right from the start. It’s not all about a particular mission getting underway but rather that and the results and where it goes from there. I’m cautiously enthused about it and have some hopes.
Grade: B
