Comic Review: Break Out #1

Break Out #1

Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

Writer: Zack Kaplan

Art: Wilton Santos

Colors: Jason Wordie

Letters: Jim Campbell

Last week’s Dark Horse release Break Out brings us to a planet Earth that is being passively invaded by weird flying cubes of unknown technology. This premise by itself bares a lot of potential but the added twist by the end of the chapter really hyped me up for what may come of this.

The chapter opens up with an evacuation routine taking place in a high school with narration from our protagonist, Liam, giving us tons of exposition about how the cubes just showed up one day and nobody can get inside. A key element of the cubes is: they kidnap young people at random. No one can tell when it’s coming and no one can stop it when it does. Liam’s brother, Tommy, was taken in one of these raids and now he’s made his life mission to get his brother back while everyone else, including their mother, seems to be hopeless about getting Tommy back.

Zack Kaplan wrote the script for this number one quite decently. I’m not fond of the exposition bomb that was dropped on the first few pages, but Kaplan padded it with a diegetic event in universe so it wasn’t so bad. Afterwards, however, the pace picks up nicely. We’re presented with Liam’s difficulties in dealing with his brother’s abduction as well as his resolve in reverting it. And this is where the story hooked me beautifully. Kaplan all of sudden turns this, honestly pretty glum story, into an engaging heist comic! I was surprised but there were signs before the “putting a crew together” montage came up.

Artwork is handled by Wilton Santos and is easily a highlight. Not only is his style very clean and polished but his character designs are quite unique. Crucial when you’re making a comic about real people and not supers in tights. Santos also paced the crew montage between the panels. It has that whole back and forth in between each recruit and it’s pretty damn cool. Unlike anything I’ve seen in a comic before.

Santos’ lines are wonderfully complemented by Jason Wordie’s colors. As usual, I first noticed the lighting and how well realistic/stylized it seemed. It’s a cool realistic approach, nothing much to it. But then I noticed the use of proper palettes in the storytelling. This gave the comic much more life and personality. The best example of this is the sequence where Liam remembers his little brother and these memories are, inevitably, intertwined with memories of the night of Tommy’s kidnapping in violent red.

Lettering by Jim Campbell does its job in a sense that it stays under the radar. Regular dialogue and a mild difference to voices coming from electronic devices. This issue is mostly just dialog with little action and there isn’t much space for sound effects either so I’m looking forward to seeing what Campbell can do with the premise.

This feels like a comic crafted by a group of people that loves the medium and has a lot to learn. Break Out is off to a nice start and some elements should get polished as it progresses. Definitely check this one out if you’re a sci-fi fan as well as a heist fan.