Rom Volume 1: Earthfall

I couldn’t finish this because the artwork is so bad. Really, really awful. The worst I’ve seen outside of indie comics certainly, and largely due to just terrible decision-making on the artists’ part.The artists’ chosen style for this includes putting thick black outlines around everything, which has the unfortunate effect of making every panel look like a page from a colouring book that somebody’s already filled in. So for starters it looks childish. Worse, it sucks the life out of any potential sense of movement. The heavy black outlines make everything look static; there’s no flow or dynamism in the art at all, a crushing flaw for comic book work. I’ve never stopped reading a comic for bad artwork before, because it can be excitingly bad, if you see what I mean. But this is just so dull and lifeless I couldn’t go on. If he always draws comics this way, he should be fired.Even his most basic decisions are just plain wrong for this comic. Imagine you’re commissioned to do the artwork for a book about a space knight called ROM who wears a suit of armour all over. How do you go about making that character look great? Exciting? Well, the first thing you’d probably do is give him a suit of really gleaming, shiny silver armour. Which means you need lots of high-contrast. White gleaming highlights and black for reflection lines as well as shadows. Like Sal Buscema did. Like Jack Kirby would’ve done. Like ANYBODY would’ve done if they could except this guy. This artist paints him all in low-contrast pastel shades of light blue-grey, so poor old ROM goes through everything looking as if he’s encased in pale concrete. Again, dull and lifeless.If you’re not at all fussy about artwork, give it a go. But it’s too expensive if you are. It was so boring I couldn’t take any more.

A re-imagining of the legendary series. Art and design are horrible, makes you think they were working on super low budget abd could not make the launch with a star penciler. Stories are ok ish but art is a distraction. Dire Wraits look wrong as well.