Aftershock is easily one of my favourite new publishers to pop up over the past few years. Paul Jenkins, Brian Azzarello, Marguerite Bennett, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti … it sounds like a Hall of Fame nominee list of writers. But for some reason retailers in my neck of the woods didn’t take a risk on some of the books. Neither did readers it would seem or preorders would have been higher. It was a bit of a struggle for my little band of comic book brothers to track down issues. But the word seems to be getting out that these are some A grade books. So it is no surprise that writer extraordinaire Mark Waid would be tapped to co-write the latest Aftershock comic, Captain Kid.
“Chris Vargas is a middle-aged man with a hacking cough, an obsolete job, and a bombastic secret: whenever he likes, he can transform into the teenage superhero Captain Kid! In this, his first recorded adventure, he encounters Helea, a mystery woman who knows more about him than he does, and Halliday, a mad businessman with a catastrophic weapon!” So we have a reverse Captain Marvel/Shazam situation where an adult gets to live the dream of becoming young again. But with super powers.
As I mentioned, Mark is only a co-writer and is sharing duties with Tom Peyer who fans of the 1990’s Legion of Super-Heroes will fondly remember. And it’s not like Tom was doing nothing over the years with credits at Marvel, Wildstorm, Bongo and Valiant. I will admit that I kind of found the scenes in the bar in the opening pages a bit disjointed and hard to follow. It was as if the bar patrons were just randomly saying stuff. Does Chris know he can transform into Captain Kid? Is there a backstory of Captain Kid adventures we are missing? As the comic went along the flow of the story got much better. The art from Wilfredo Torres with colours by Kelly Fitzpatrick is pretty darn good and works well. WIlfredo’s style is clean and easy to follow as you would expect from a super hero comic.
Overall I liked the comic quite a bit and am curious to see what happens next but I don’t know if I would go so far as to add it to my pull list with some of the other Aftershock comics I read each month.
Issue: Captain Kid #1 | Publisher: Aftershock
Writer: Mark Waid & Tom Peyer | Artists: Wilfredo Torres & Kelly Fitzpatrick
Price: $3.99
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