Resistor
Staff: Wes Allen
Overview:
A well done, but ultimately forgettable, political drama
Review:
So I got hit up about a month back to read Resistor and I’m going to give it a review today! I’m not a big fan of political dramas but this one has some pretty cool real world parallels. Anyway, let’s dive right into it!
Art
Cover is cool kind of “iPad” style color scheme. The interior art is very different than the cover but isn’t bad by any stretch. It’s certainly not “big publisher professional”, but it has it’s own charms. A lot of the scenes are well composed visually and the artistic style tends to favor a very crowded approach to composition (which works well). There is a weird stylistic thing with the way artists depict jaws in this one, but I am gonna give it a pass because it seems intentional and part of the comic’s visual style rather than an error.
Lettering
The text can be very hard to read at times. The credits page had a hard-on-the-eyes font and the first page’s “hooray” were transparent over a complex background (without a dialogue box). I guess this is the style they were going for, but it comes out very jumbled and difficult to read. Elsewhere the text is legible but is made small in some panels and larger in others. When it gets small, it gets very tricky to read and I had to blow it up a bit with a digital zoom to read it. On page 13 we have this wall-o-text that comes from a radio that could have probably have been condensed by making it more succinct. There is also this disconnect between font written in and the drawn background. Sometimes the perspective/shadow doesn’t match up because it was added after (on signs for example).
Story
One thing that bothers me is that it takes this comic 10 pages to get into the story. We are given exposition in the form of a political rally before we get to a single line a dialogue from a character. We don’t seem to have a “main story” going by half way though the comic and it does feel a bit like a comic that has a good story to tell but doesn’t give you enough of a unified perspective to allow you to identify with any particular character. I mean we get that this political party is bad and that life sucks under its rule but I don’t empathize with any of the characters. It’s such a fragmented story that I can’t seem to really pin down what it’s about on a narrative level. By the end of it there is a larger story taking place but not enough in this issue to grab me in the mean time.
Overall
Overall, it’s a nice attempt but fails to deliver on anything more than a basic level. It’s not a bad comic but it’s not one that will stand out in my mind as a highlight of the year or anything. Maybe if the narrative direction was a bit more focused or the plot point more succinct it could have made for a good first issue.
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