Creative Staff:
Story: Frank Barbiere / Randy Stradley
Pencils: Colin Lorimer / Doug Wheatley
What They Say:
Scott Travers’s special suit lets him move through our world unseen and untouchable within a shadowy parallel dimension—but he doesn’t know how the suit works or where it came from. With his benefactor missing and unfriendlies after his Blackout gear, Scott must find answers before the answers find him!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Blackout kicks off a four issue miniseries, but it’s not an easy one to get into from the start simply because it was introduced in Dark Horse Presents and we get a roundabout way and not entirely clear way of understanding what happened in there. Part of the Black Sky Project series of books, the title introduces us to Scott Travers, a man that works for Avenir Microanalytics who, through mysterious means, was simply given a box that contained a special suit in it. The suit is certainly interesting as it’s black, tight and heated and allows him to open up black portals that takes him to where he wants to go. It’s not a pleasant place in between with the cold, enough so that it can really shock someone unprotected, but mostly we get a guy here who has no clue about the suit and is using it for his own means.
On the positive side, he doesn’t leap to becoming a hero nor a villain, but rather a man that’s looking for his uncle Bob, who is an important part of Avenir. Bob’s gone missing and Scott ended up looking for clues at Mechatronics, who one supposes is the prime competitor for Avenir. There’s a lot of background bits that goes into this and a smattering of flashback pieces that comes as Scott recovers from an epic hangover of sorts that feels related to use of the suit itself. Having taken a look around Mechatronics and gotten involved in a bit of a fight which caused one of their scientists to get taken into the portal briefly as well as a security guard in a large mechanized piece that lost his legs because of it, it turned into a fair mess. But it’s something that’s not going to keep Scott from looking for his uncle.
Not that things are going well at Avenir either as the whole situation involved that location as well apparently and part of the place is being treated as a crime scene. Scott gets to play the doofus fairly well here since he knows more of what’s going on than he can let on and he has to avoid revealing anything to his apparent boss, Kaity, who is just furious in general, from the way the lab work can’t be done, the fact that Bob is missing and the fact that Scott can’t seem to care. There’s an interesting intensity that and it plays well off of the way Scott tries to just schlub his way through things until he can get back to what he now views as his prime job. Which is going back into Mechatronics to find clues since he knows Bob isn’t there, but there may be something more he can find out.
Getting a handle on the book isn’t easy since it shifts position a few times and it doesn’t lay out clearly what happened in its Dark Horse Presents chapters. We do get some interesting pieces coming out of Mechatronics though by discovering that the suit Scott is wearing may just be a prototype, one that was slated to be destroyed, and that’s given him an edge in what he’s doing. But it’s also called to attention the higher powers that want the whole thing cleaned up immediately since it threatens other plans that the corporation has. We don’t get much in the way of detail for the characters here, again it’s all very superficial, but it has a neat aspect to it in a way that leaves you wanting more because of the efficient way that events are being handled. The book does hit the ground running here, but even as it stumbles because it’s not a clean first issue, it manages to keep you engaged enough to want to know more.
This issue also intends to split its time some, which may be for the best, as there’s a King Tiger backup feature. I remember the character from the Comics Greatest World material but I really don’t remember the character much at all. What we get her has him in it for maybe three or four panels, but it presents a pretty good short form narrative as we get a former soldier named Milo that looks simply crazy but has a huge monkey on his shoulder that needs to be dealt with. It’s not an awkward tale, though it works in two periods of time for the first couple of pages that works well to show the scale of time involved and how long of a problem it is, and it also has a decent bit of humor along the way too. It’ll probably be the total length of a standalone issue by the time it’s done, but even with what little we get here, you can see how King Tiger would be a hard character to handle his own book.
In Summary:
Just from the design and cover alone, I wanted to really like Blackout more than I did. What hampered it for me is that once again, we get a title that launched its story in Dark Horse Presents and continues on here without giving those who don’t read DHP a clean enough start to feel like we’re in on it. It’s another title where you feel like you’re a few pages behind or are missing from the book. There’s a good bit going on and it has a pretty good story to work with based on what’s here, albeit with characters that are barely one dimensional at this point, but it’s a title that has a lot of potential that I’d love to see more of, if it can really develop it. The suit and its abilities itself are the draw at this stage of the game as it’s hard to say if any of the characters will develop, but with a limited series run for it we at least potentially have the chance for a self contained story that can spin off from there.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: March 26th, 2014
MSRP: $2.99
