Comics about deformed superhuman beings have been around for eternity and have always worked. Just look at The Hulk. “Bloodshot,” a new comic series from Valiant comics by Duane Swierczynski, Manuel Garcia and Arturo Lozzi, is one of those comics. Too bad it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.
Regardless of the vibrant color scheme, its cliche premise destroys the fun.
“Bloodshot†starts out as a story about a soldier who goes into Afghanistan trying to save a friend from terrorists- “it was all a military training exercise.†The difference here is that the protagonist, an experiment called Bloodshot, thinks the dream world is real. The story is as bland and overdone as it sounds. There’s no personality to any of the characters at all. They all fit into the same standard character roles we’ve seen in these stories countless times before. There’s no reason to care for these characters, even Bloodshot.
The artwork also has some problems. The character’s faces don’t look right. Scary even. Not to mention the character designs so generic that these can be any random military or, worse, middle-eastern terrorist character in any comic you can pick in any shop. The only halfway decent character design is Bloodshot. Even then he doesn’t stand out that much from many other comic book creatures.
One good thing that can be said is that the coloring is done right in all the right places and the comic is appealing to look at. That seems to be the only thing that worked well in this comic.
“Bloodshot #1†had a decent premise but it failed in execution with a poor plot with poring characters, characters with faces that don’t look right and character designs that don’t stand out. Don’t let the cool cover fool you into buying this comic. Save it for something that’s actually worth reading and maybe even has a better sense of what it wants to be.
Leave a Reply