Comic Review: Artemis & The Assassin #1

Artemis & The Assassin #1

Aftershock Comics

Writer: Stephanie Phillips

Art: Francesca Fantini & Meghan Hetrick

Whatever is it that interests me in stories about time-traveling agents managed by a whole bureaucratic organization I don’t know. However, when I read the synopsis for Artemis & The Assassin I just had to know how that idea was going to play. So here is what I thought of the story’s starting point.

This issue contains two basic segments. The first one starts off by presenting Maya, an assassin for a time-traveling organization that offers its services to kill important historic figures in order to alter the course of history. Maya is shown to be an exceptional assassin but hot-headed and with a strange relationship with her superior, Isak.
We then cut to a red-haired woman shooting a Nazi official from afar and running for her life from the official’s backup. The woman is a spy for the French resistance in WWII, Virginia Hall, code name Artemis. She’s presented with her next mission: take intelligence to allied troops about the upcoming Normandy beach invasion. Shortly after, Maya shows up to assassinate her. The second segment, which apparently is going to follow along the first one throughout the series, is about Maya’s training in the organization and how she became what she is today.

From what I had heard of Stephanie Phillips’s writing I confess that I maybe was a little too excited about this issue and forgot that it was a #1. However talented Phillips might be, and she sure displays quite the storytelling in this first chapter, there’s not much to be said about the plot just yet. This was a simple set up edition that serves to engage the story on the ones to come. One thing I can say for certain is that I was instantly captivated by each of the main characters. Maya is a hot head mess we’re all used to love and Artemis is a classic brave and noble, always willing to help others.

The art for this series gets the job done although I can say it wasn’t my favorite. There are two different artists, one for each segment of the comic. The first one is illustrated by Meghan Hetrick. The facial expressions carry a lot of detail yet I cannot tell why some panels seem to show the characters in a frozen state. I feel like it is a poor distribution of white of the eye and iris, which vary drastically depending on the expression, but that could be nitpicky from me. I liked Francesca Fantini’s work a little better. The facial expressions are a little more precise and organic making them feel more natural with the dialogue. In terms of backgrounds, I would say I’d invert my preference, since Hetrick’s backgrounds, despite not being as detailed as Fantini’s, carry more life and organic feel to them.

Despite its few flaws, Artemis & The Assassin promises to be an interesting new series from Aftershock. If you’re interested in time-traveling agencies like I am, it is worth giving it a go in order to support the publication. But it also might be worth waiting on the next chapter to see how the story engages.