Badrock #1 // Review
The big, grey guy is beating the hell out of the guy with the big, silly-looking gun. The guy with the gun is a mercenary. The big grey. guy...welll...he just wants his mom back. It’s a battle that takes place in the arctic at the beginning of the issue...but more importantly, it’s a battle that takes place in medias res. In order to find out what the hell’s going on, the reader’s going to have to read through the entire issue of Badrock #1. Writer Rob Liefeld and artist Seth Damoose open a series featuring Liefeld’s Ben Grimm ripoff character from Youngblood. Color comes to the page courtesy of Pedro Estouco.
It was...well...earlier this summer. Badrock had some time off. He was sitting down in his mom’s kitchen having a stack of waffles and looking forward to the new movies coming-out including Nolan’d Odyssey and the new Spider-Man movie. That’s when the big “krakoom” happened; a bunch of guys burst-in with big guns and tactical combat gear. Try as he might, Badrock wasn’t able to keep the military guys from taking his mom. They even managed to incapacitate him. Now he’s mad.
Liefeld’ plot is pretty simple. The dialogue ranges from almost okay to extremely awful. The basic action premise...isn’t anything that the reader has to spend a whole lot of time thinking about. The hero has to burst into a secure facility in some distant corner of the world to save the. damsel in distress...which in this case happens to be the hero’s mom. It would be fun if it wasn’t so cliche on so many levels. To his credit, Liefeld DOES manage to keep the title character every bit as charming as Ben Grimm. He’s just a nice guy who wants his mom back.
Damoose delivers the action with a mix of traditional Kirby-inspired superhero action art and just a bit of silliness around the edges of the action. Badrock manages to look like a big, badass bruiser AND...a cuddly cartoon character at the same time. He may not have the kind of nuance or sophistication of Paul Chadwick’s Concrete *who he bears more than a passing resemblance to,) but Badrock has a really cool presence on the page thanks to some sharply stylish art on the part of Damoose. Estouco lends a vibrant personality to the page in some tastefully vivid color. There are some particularly immersive atmosphere to the page in exterior shots in the Arctic as well.
To be fairL Badrock isn’t just a rip-off of Ben Grimm. He’s also a rip-off of Steve Rogers and...well...a few other characters. And the plot in question DOES manage to take a bit of a dpearture from aspects of the cliches that it’s likely to be riding through the entire run of the story. It’s not like the first issue in the series isn’t fun, but it isn’t terribly memorable either.
