Posted in: Comics, Review | Tagged: alex ross, doug klauba, Dynamite Entertainment, fantasy, felideus, Jim Kreuger, project superpowers, rob williams, sci-fi, Sergio Davila, Stephen Sadowski, superheroes

Project: Superpowers #1 Review: The Project Begins Anew

A ghostly specter watches over city streets begging for someone to look up. It watches Masquerade on her way to a television interview where she answers questions about the Project: Superpowers team. Suddenly, lightning strikes around the world, and all planes begin falling from the sky. Despite claiming to be retired, Project: Superpowers reunites to catch the falling aircraft. Green Lama holds all the aircraft in the world with a vast magical net, and Black Terror, Masquerade, the Mighty Samson, the Scarab, work to evacuate the planes before Lama's magic gives out.

This is my first introduction into the world of Project: Superpowers, and I've not read the original Jim Kreuger, Alex Ross, Doug Klauba and Stephen Sadowski series.

This comic makes its conceit clear very quickly though. Project: Superpowers was a war-time effort, the group was trapped in a magical urn, and now they are back in the year 2018.

That's pretty straightforward, and it allows for another take on the Captain America "man out of time" idea.

This comic doesn't spend much time on that (it's likely it has done so in past iterations of the series), and it moves towards that crisis with the falling planes. It reveals little of the cause, and it ends as we are beginning to get clues about what's going on.

It's a quick read for sure. It does a decent job of giving you a concise idea of who its characters are.

The "everything was simpler in the old days" line is a bit tiresome. They weren't. There were fascist-sympathizers, corruption, Japanese internment, rampant racism and Antisemitism, and all sorts of other deplorable things in the U.S. back then. Things may seem less simple now because we talk about a lot of these things, try to confront them, and are more honest about what the U.S. is now. That creates the illusion of sudden complexity, but these things didn't just suddenly spring up sometime in the early 2000's.

Sergio Davila's artwork is quite gorgeous. His style leans on the realistic, giving a detailed and textured look to everyone and everything. The costumes look fantastic, and there is an especially nice impact effect attributed to Samson catching one of the planes. Felideus is on color art, and the result is a well-balanced palette that, of course, gets enjoyably wild once the costumes show up.

Project: Superpowers #1 is an enjoyable introduction to the world of these characters for the new reader. For those who've followed this story in the past, it's likely an enjoyable return of this super team. The artwork is excellent, and the story is fairly interesting. This one is worth a recommendation. Feel free to check it out.

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