A dark cyberpunk title that doesn’t quite reach its potential.
Creative Staff
Story: Vlad Yudin
Cover: Tim Bradstreet
Script: Erik Hendrix
Art: Dwayne Harris
Lettering: Shawn DePasquale
Editor: Edwin Mejia
What They Say
After Smash, a loyal soldier of The Horde, is left for dead and his wife is taken by the very group he swore allegiance to, he vows to rescue her. Aided by the few friends he has left and a mysterious serum that gives him superhuman strength, Smash sets out to enact his vengeance on his former allies.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Head Smash debuted this summer at a few comic book conventions—most notably San Diego Comic Con—to much fanfare. Set in a dystopian future, Head Smash shows a lot of potential as the possible beginning to a series. However, for as great as some aspects of it are, it is just as disappointing for the things it does not quite get right.
Smash is a top enforcer for The Horde—a criminal organization that runs the city of Ares. Taken from the orphanage he hated while young, he has grown up with the gang and is their most loyal subject, never giving his orders even a second thought. He steals and murders, all for the greater good of The Horde. His only interests outside of the organization are his young wife, Layla, and their soon-to-be-born son. He would do anything for her. So when she mentions that she wants to leave Ares and forge a life on the coast, he finds himself requesting to leave the organization to which he had long pledged his life.
Unfortunately, The Horde has another plan for him. He agrees to undertake one more job before leaving—collecting a sample of Dream, a new drug created by a scientist known as The Chemist that is ready to be sold on the streets. However, once the deal has gone down, a group of Horde Bones (soldiers) attack, killing The Chemist and Smash’s partner. Smash, however, manages to just survive the onslaught and get away.
He is found and nursed back to health by Mako, The Chemist’s father, using a serum that had provided the basis for Dream. When injected into the bloodstream, the serum provides a temporary boost in strength and physical resistance, as well as assists in healing, but it has not been fully tested, so the side-effects of long-term use are as yet unknown. Considering it futile to try and get revenge on his old benefactors, Smash decides to use the serum long enough to protect him while getting Layla out of town. But when he returns to Ares to find that she has been taken by The Horde, he knows that direct confrontation with them is unavoidable and that the serum will be his key to success.
Head Smash is a graphic novel that I really took to, mostly because of the world it is set in. It is a gritty, dystopian world that we can understand very quickly. From Smash’s violent fight with other orphans to the gory execution of some traitorous Bones, the world—and Smash’s place in it—is set within the first few pages. So when Smash is betrayed and has to delve deeper into the criminal underground, there is nothing surprising about it. It all feels real.
The story itself is solid, though it is not as well-developed as I would like. As I said above, Smash’s personality and role in society are simply, but effectively, portrayed within the first few pages of the novel, so the way he reacts to his betrayal are very believable. He has a simple goal: find his wife and escape, and it is a goal that he never wavers from. He discovers that she has been taken by The Horde and he’ll likely have to fight them to rescue her? Bring them on. He finds out that she used to be a whore? Not an issue. He learns that their whole relationship was setup by The Horde? Whatever. Even when it becomes obvious that the only way he will likely be able to succeed is to single-handedly take down The Horde—the single most powerful entity in the whole city—he never wavers. As long as the end result is that he can rescue Layla and their son, then none of the incidentals matter to him. Get in his way, and he will kill you.
It’s powerful stuff, but it is also stuff that is being hurt by the somewhat haphazard structure of the narrative. There are two issues here, though they are somewhat related. The first issue is that the story bounces around quite a bit. There are a lot of instances of “Later,” or “Days Later,” and even some “Years Ago,” and other such time skips. It is very distracting as I always want to ask “What? You mean absolutely nothing of note happens in those weeks we just skipped?” And I ask these things because I find that the story often glosses over facts without properly developing them. For example, Smash makes the deduction that The Chemist was Mako’s son, but there’s no contextual clues to show us this other than Mako’s claim to have known The Chemist years ago. It comes out of nowhere, as do many of the developments in the story. Conclusions are reached with no context that would allow us to see why the conclusions are made. In prose fiction, we might consider this to be an issue of telling and not showing, and frankly it hurts what is otherwise a really solid story.
The artwork is also mostly good, but is frustrating for what is not right. I really like the style, as it matches the grittiness of the tone of the plot. Similar to the Hellboy comics, the gutter space Head Smash is black rather than white, giving the whole thing a much darker look than the already dark coloring. The art itself is a terrific mix of hyper-realistic and vaguely indistinct that adds to the uneasiness that we are supposed to be feeling from the storyline. It blends the two very well.
My issue here, though, is that I find there is often a disconnect between the foreground and the background. Perhaps this is a stylistic choice, but to me it often looks as if the characters were drawn separately from the rest of the panel and then unconvincingly photoshopped in after the fact. This was not the case for the entire novel, but it was for healthy portions of it. As I said, perhaps it was a stylistic choice, but for me it was very distracting.
In Summary
Head Smash shows a lot of potential, though I would be interested in seeing something like a Director’s Cut of it where the blanks are filled in better. It is violent and at times unnerving, and the overall idea of the story is well thought out. I just would have liked to have seen more of that “thinking out” to have made it to the page. That said, while I cannot necessarily find anything that suggests this will turn into a series, it does feel like this is the start to a much larger story, and as the beginning of a possibly bigger story, it is more than fine. Recommended
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: A
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Arcana Studio
Release Date: August 13, 2013
MSRP: $19.99
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