Comic Review: The Worst Dudes #1

Dark Horse Comics

Writers: Aubrey Sitterson

Artist: Tony Gregori

Colorist: Lovern Kindzierski

Letters: Taylor Esposito

Yet another story about a gang of characters with dubious personalities hit the stores this week. The worst dudes is a story with great potential that is not apparently concerned with the charisma of its character roster.

The comic opens up with Sam Sugar, a dirty cop, torturing a seal-like creature for selling drugs in his boss’s turf. In the middle of the commotion, Sugar is contacted by representatives of the Empress, whose husband’s daughter has gone missing. The empress wants Sugar to find the girl, who is also a famous pop star, with the help of her son, Bang, an angst teen god who is bound to make Sugar’s life difficult.

Sitterson’s work is new to me, but there is a lot of interesting aspects to it. The lore to this universe appears to be rich and well laid out, managing to remind a bit of Saga, with the mix of sci-fi and fantasy elements. However, for a first issue, this was hard to digest. None of the main characters is charismatic enough to captivate the reader and keep the story going. If any of them, I was able to see some hope for Sam Sugar who is the one having to deal with the other two, but good God, this is a tough read from the start. Everything is dirty, all the characters are rude and want no good but their own. Hard to care about stakes.

The line art is done by Tony Gregori who does a decent job mostly throughout the first chapter. There are some weird anatomical mistakes at some points such as Sugar’s head is just a tad too big for his body, or his face too large for its features. I’m also not a fan of the artist’s choice for details, almost always appearing to increase the nausea effect provoked by the characters. Although that could be intentional to this title’s idea. Colors are by Kindzierski and are easily a highlight for this issue. The colorist maintains a strong consistency with the color palette and that really helps with keeping track of what’s going on in this series’ chaotic world.

Taylor Esposito handles the lettering for this issue and he is really the only name I recognized. I liked the details with Caligula’s, the third co-protagonist speech bubbles and sound effects are always nice to have. There are weird lettering details I noticed with Sugar’s speech that sometimes just turns into a crude font which I guess it’s supposed to be a robotic voice coming out of his cybernetic implants? The thing is, that’s all assumption. We’re never told, in this issue, if Sam is a cyborg and if his voice cracks.

This series bears great potential, really it does. The plot is not new but it isn’t bad either. However, the mess that is the characters made me feel like I can’t read any further. I just really don’t care about any of them and don’t want to read more. It can be a great series but this was a bad first issue mostly due to that. The art is off at some places but it gets the job done with some nice details for the keen-eyed reader. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this.

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