Crowman

C2D4 Comics

By Martin Buxton and Tony Wicks

Well here it is the long overdue review of Crowman, sorry it took a while and in my defence this comic has been to and throw between my house and work for a fair few weeks now, and every time I sit down to review it something crops up which just wont wait and it gets delayed.

Still I am here now, the phones off the hook, the front door has a huge great big sign on which reads “unless you are here to give me money, you can Feck off” and I am typing furiously just in case someone decides its time to drop a bomb on my house.

On to the comic, it’s a half size black and white indy in the fashion we have come accustomed too,

The first thing I noticed was the actual quality of the printing, its really rather nice and shows off the tonal qualities of the art, and the logo C2D4 is genius

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The story opens within the offices of the Havenville Chronicle at knocking off time on a Friday, work mates leave and the daughter of the establishment stays back in order to finish up some work, when the work is finished she leaves the building and is followed by three thugs.

While this is happening we see certain preparations elsewhere by a long haired man and a Crow mask, back to our girl on the street how has now been intercepted by said thugs.

There’s some nice detail in the art and the tones and feel are well thought out, but it has to be said I did feel that the art was a little over styled in places and the thugs came across as more of a parody of thugs rather than being proper menacing bad dudes.

At this point we learn that these are employees of an unnamed person who has taken offence to the papers current style of reporting, and a warning is about to be issued.

Enter The Crowman and the story picks up pace here on, without giving to much away, the are some nice twists in the story, some very original and sinister characters, we get to meet the father and learn that perhaps the daughter has a little more say in what happens than she initially lets on too.

All in all this debut issue shows promise, its not super duper mind blowing, but at the same time it is above average, maybe if these guy could have put out a complete story in the shape of a small Graphic Novel I would be raving about it like I have with Wolfmen, but that’s an expensive undertaking and I understand why its not possible at the moment, but I would like to read more, and. "I am really impressed by how much story spoken and unspoken has been crammed in this first issue", now if the artist can resist the urge to put unnecessary detail where its not needed and create some believable thugs we may just have a winner here. This really is a good little debut issue and you both should feel proud to have achieved this much. But because of the format and the dodgy hooligans I cant bring myself to give it much better than a 7/10

I am really interested in seeing The Hack which is advertised on the inside cover, I assume that this is going to be by the same team.