The Darkness #1 // Review
Jackie Estacado is having casual sex with a woman that he just met. This is nothing new for Jackie. The streamers of black liquid that come pouring out of Jacking in the middle of sex ARE actually quite new, however.Jackie’s prett shocked at it. The woman in question asks if it’s an STD that she should know about. That’s when the angel shows-up in The Darkness #1. Writer Marc Silvestri starts a whole new seres ot The Darkness with penciler Ed Benes and the inking team of Matt “Batt” Banning, Sal Regla, John Livesay and John Livesay. Color comes to the page courtesy of Arif Prianto.
The angel is one of many who have arrived. They’re there to deal with a being of the darkness who hasn’t quite awakened to his true identity yet. He’s a supernatural force that has control over an otherworldly dimension and all of the demons living in it. He doesn’t really know this yet, though. And so long as he doesn’t know it, he wll be that much easier to deal with for the agnels who have arrived. The darkness dwelling within Jackie might have other ideas, though. Jackie just wanted to have sex and now he’s entered a very dangerous place.
Silvestri wraps some basic elements around the central premise of the story as Jackie has his awakening. The anti-her essence of the character might be a little bit of fun to travel with as the character is suddenly forced to grow-up and actually deal with things that might rest outside the very limited nature of his day-to-day experience. The general atmosphere of the series isn’t too terribly interesting in and of itself. Given the right narrative momentum The Darkness could really turn into something interesting. Time will tell.
The art team keeps it dark. Have you rendering with your inks is accompanied by Prianto’s dark colors. Action glides across the page with a degree of grace. What isn't delivered all that clearly is a sense of the power in the supernatural here. Jackie isn't necessarily all that phased by what's going on around him. And it's meant to be very powerful. However, there isn't a whole lot of power that can be felt in its presence on the page. It all looks very cool. It all just sort of looks vaguely supernatural. Everything. Even the woman at the bar. Everything has this radiance about it. This dark radiance. And that doesn't necessarily allow for a whole lot of range when it comes to how things will work visually.
There has been some decent work done bringing this particular premise to the page once more. It'll be interesting to see where it goes from here. The basic premise is nice enough and clever enough that I could actually go in a whole bunch of different directions that don't necessarily have anything to do with where it's been before. It will remain to be seeing if it gets any more traction than the original series.
