Financing a career as a superhero isn’t easy.
Creative Staff:
Story: Donny Cates, Eliot Rahal
Art: Geoff Shaw
Colors: Lauren Affe
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):
Over the decades there have been any number of books that have looked at the difficult side of being a superhero, from your poor high school kid just trying to get a meal while saving the world to the wealthier types that have their entire corporations gobbled up in all sorts of ways. Dark Horse now has its own series playing in that field a bit with this new ongoing work called The Paybacks. Coming from writers Donny Cates and Eliot Rahal with some great artwork by Geoff Shaw, the series essentially gives us a quirk version of powered repo men that have some fancy tools to work with and all the bad luck in the world to make their jobs more difficult. While the cover for the opening issue didn’t exactly draw me in, it’s a book I’m glad I leafed through and found something far more interesting.
The premise revolves around the idea that a group called The Paybacks are fronted by moneyed people that are looking to collect on loans and other financial aspects from the world of heroes that borrow from them. When you fail to pay, your toys get repossessed. We get a quick hit at that at the beginning when Emory Rains and a couple of others go to collect and the guy essentially just runs. And they always run, which seems to be a given no matter the type of repo job you have. The setup for all of this straightforward as we see that The Paybacks not only collect on items and wealth but they also drag you into service with them for awhile to pay off the money that can’t be spoken for. That helps to swell the ranks a bit and while it’s a form of indentured servitude it’s that kind of gray area in a world of superheroes and supervillains that one imagines they might be able to get away with.
The focus in this installment is on Night Knight, your basic Batman type that has taken out some big loans to finance his career, his cave, and his unicorn. We see him initially going to deal with a villain du jour but instead abandoning that (and its own comedy involving the kidnapped Queen) when he discovers that his secret lair is being repo’d. There are some great moments in his internal dialogue, written down on yellow lined paper with scratched out notes, as well as how he doesn’t intend for his unicorn to be repo’d. It’s not quite Bat Manuel from the old Tick books but the elements are there and it works in the characters favor as a Batman styled character without the gravitas. Getting a look at him at the same time that we see the alpha team making their way into the secret lair and dealing with the threats there works very well, especially with the humor of it all.
What works a little less is the beta team off on a different mission to recover a guy named Battery, which because of the structure of how it’s laid out feels like it’s the same place as Night Knight’s place. What unifies the two missions is that of Driver, obviously the driver for the jobs, who has a van that’s not a van which has access to a whole other world inside of it that’s like a fancy mansion in itself. There are quirks abound with this and the Driver character comes across really well as I can imagine him stealing many scenes in the future. Because these two missions are going on at the same time and the intent is to get Night Knight on board as a Paybacks member for a bit, it just feels confused and took a couple of re-reads to really try to make sure they were separate jobs if only because some of the location aspects of Battery and Night Knight’s feel the same. Once you make that break as to what the differences are though and read it through again it all clicks much better.
Coates and Rahal do a solid job here of giving us a good feeling for the characters while also playing to some of the pop culture aspects, notably in Bloodpouch teaching The Soviet Nunchuck to speak in English through cool movie phrases only. It’s a familiar gag but it’s executed well enough as a kind of workplace humor to pass the time. There obviously isn’t a lot of character depth but Night Knight made me an instant fan of his if only for the unicorn. There’s a lot of potential fun to be had with him if he gets a chance to really expand his role here. Shaw’s artwork is spot on for this book as it’s not done on the simple side and there are some great panel layouts and transitions that are done to make it fun and interesting to dig into the details of. The costume designs are certainly there and I hope for better (larger) looks at them in the future since so much of what we get here feels like it’s from a distance. With a quirky cast of characters from around the world, the sky’s the limit in terms of design and he’s definitely having fun with it.
In Summary:
The Paybacks is not a book that was on my radar for the most part because a lot of superhero oriented material outside of the big two just feels forced to me. What the team here has done is to create what feels like a potentially rich world to work with through a comedic bent but with the right kind of humor to know that we’re not going to be something that’s far too serious and self-important. The concept is one that has been done before in a different way and what we get here looks like a lot of fun if they really run with it as a kind of repo man suicide squad dealing with the superheroes that fail to pay their debts. Mixing in someone else towards the end that may be gunning for them as well is just the icing on the cake. What it needs to do in the next few issues beyond that though is to really make the characters come alive and standout so that it feels more than just a gimmick with a good bit of fun to it. And from what they’ve done so far I have hopes that they really can do it.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: September 16th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
