Posted in: Comics, Review | Tagged: comic book reviews, decorum, image comics, jonathan hickman, Space Opera

REVIEW: Decorum #1 — "Quality Space Opera"

Published Thu, 12 Mar 2020 17:30:01 -0500

(Image Comics, creative team: Jonathan Hickman, Mike Huddleston, Rus Wooton)

With enough supplementary material to make a good chunk of a series bible, this stylish and slick new series has clearly spent a lot of development time with worldbuilding, sussing out how things are to effect character interactions. It's gorgeous looking, and has a super engaging protagonist with smooth line deliveries and a killer visual design. For all the bulk here, however, there's not so much story. Admittedly, for five bucks, this is still a very good value for the sheer weight of it and is not some fly by night thing that doesn't have a plan. This is some Matt Mercer stuff here, with hooks for stories way down the line. That's great, sure, but it mortgages the present for future stories that we may never see (spirit, if they have to cancel San Diego … sorry, digression) in shortcutting characterization. This just made the mark on the "bang for the buck" scale due to the scale of its ambitions. It's quality space opera with a very distinctive sense of its own ambiance. RATING: BUY.

DECORUM #1
WRITER: JONATHAN HICKMAN
ARTIST / COVERS A & B: MIKE HUDDLESTON
SERIES PREMIERE
There are many assassins in the known universe. This is the story of the most well-mannered one.
"Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what knife you use."