Other World #1 Review

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Reviewer: Kevin S. Mahoney
Story Title: N/A

Written by: Phil Jimenez
Penciled by: Phil Jimenez
Inked by: Andy Lanning
Colored by: Jeromy Cox
Lettered by: Nick Napolitano
Editor: Will Dennis
Publisher: Vertigo

This book seems like three separate stories vying for preeminence in the same short stack of pages. First, there’s the Real World-esque soap opera of the teen to twenty-something multi-racial cast. Adjacent to that, there is some sort of sorcerous peril occurring on another plane of existence. That conflict is joined by what appears to be a techno-race the fans of The Matrix franchise would find familiar, right down to the traitor who would rather work for the black hats. The three styles, factions, and casts sort of collide in the issue’s final pages but they are brought together so haphazardly it is difficult to make sense of the overall story. That’s a major roadblock for a first issue.

It’s not as though the individual threads are hard to understand. The mystical world is under siege from the techno-futurist one. The female sorceress there wants to get a few talented souls from Earth to empower and enlist in the defense of her homeland. The robot monsters want to spoil, sabotage, and in every way undermine that attempt (which seems to be a last ditch defensive effort by the magicians). Meanwhile in our reality, a girl that looks incredibly similar to the red haired sorceress is simultaneously exploring meditation, a love triangle, college life, and her budding career in rock and roll. It’s even clear that the two girls are in some way the key to everything; it’s just that every other character seems shoehorned into the story.

While the relationships between the main character and her terran cohabitants are clear (classmate, boyfriend, ex-coworker, band mate, friend, fling’s roommate, and a few random audience members) there seems no rhyme or reason to the amount of focus they receive in this initial issue. It might be that all these people receive the gift of power mentioned before the collision of realities that ends this book, but there seems little to gain in introducing everyone first. The vignettes of all these people fail resonate with the story except in terms of each other. It’s rare for a first issue to dilute the impact of its characters by including too many of them, but that certainly happens here. Just getting everyone out there and connected to each other practically precludes forward momentum in the plot or their relationships, and that hampers any hook the next issue could have. It’s a major miscalculation.

The art is complicit in the confusion through the exact same kind of over stimulation. There’s simply too much of everything. Some single pages have twenty-something panels in them, all containing the same level of rich detail. A small panel, say three by six inches, can have as many as thirty of forty people depicted in it; sorting out what is important and what isn’t is more unnecessary strain on the reader. While there are fewer characters to sort through in the mystical realm, the lack of direct person-to-person verbiage makes matching the mystical names and corresponding creature feature faces just as difficult. The overcrowded and confusing layout spoils what are in essence well-rendered pencils, imaginative and vibrant colors, and interesting looking (if a bit derivative) settings.