Payback can be a scary thing, even for superheroes.
Creative Staff:
Story: Donny Cates, Eliot Rahal
Art: Geoff Shaw
What They Say:
Heroism doesn’t come cheap, so when superheroes borrow money to finance their genetic enhancements or crime-fighting supercomputers, their debts make student loans look like IOUs! Enter the Paybacks, a repo squad composed of bankrupt former heroes here to foreclose on everybody’s secret lairs! From the team that delivered the acclaimed Buzzkill!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The premise of The Paybacks is interesting. Having heroes rent out costumes and having a squad get it back when they don’t pay up seems like a good premise. The premise for this issue works for the most part as the authors make the repo attempt as interesting as it possibly could be. The method: interesting characters. Night Knight wanting to become a hero only to realize that he’s about to be repo’d leads him to take desperate measures that works out as much as he looks like he works out. Meanwhile, having Miss Adventure having to go through hell for a repo mission casts her as a person that will get her hands dirty to get the job done, but leaves room for more development as a character. These two among the other casts feels like an ensemble that will provide some solid entertainment with a good story.
The problem though relies on the more disjointed factor of said story’s storytelling.One of the more concerning issues about the paybacks is the disjointed storytelling of the series. Reading through this issue is clear that there is a lot of ideas that they wanted to put down. However, the way that they’re telling it feels too expansive for the amount of pages that they were working through. There’s a lot of good interesting materials about the superhero Night Knight and how he’s getting dragged into the scenario, but his art as a story telling for this issue feels abrupt. The meta-commentary about his nemesis shows this particular abruptness, making it a lot harder for you to feel invested into the series. It becomes more apparent when they have the other aspects of the team commands in the repossession of the gear. Seeing these attempts to get the gear looks cool, but the sequences for the story don’t follow as well as it could have. It feels that they’re trying to cram in too much information for the story, relying on the visuals to carry them. However, the visuals as a narrative can carry them so much and the limits of the visuals seems reached with the amount of information they tried putting out to get people from A to C.
On the subject of visuals, the art is well done. The attention for detail works well for the medium that they’re trying to convey, as well as the commentary they’re trying to portray. They’re showing that the business of superheroes is it necessary as clean as we think it is, and more importantly the attempts to get back the equipment that would be rented out to become a superhero is equally not clean. The artist was clearly able to show not only the action going on for what the story is trying to convey, but at the same time put emphasis on various story aspects that make the overall premise of The Paybacks interesting. Once again, the art’s ability to convey the story seems great but maxes out at certain points as the pacing and story telling does not have time to let the material connect to the audience in full.
In Summary:
The Paybacks shows promise. The characters so far seem interesting and the premise seems well executed concept wise. The actual sequence of the story is going to need some work for the next issue. The biggest dressing for the next issue is to get the information out as efficient me as possible. The authors need to work on letting the material as the story breathing their work so that everybody can appreciate it. If they can do that there’ll be a lot more potential fulfilled for this work. Who knows maybe we’ll even see people jump on board for this series in full.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: September 16th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
