Review: The Strain #1, The Fall

I’m so excited to be reviewing this comic, because unlike my prior reviews, I actually hated The Strain #1, The Fall. Now since this is the first I’ve read of either Guillermo Del Toro or Chuck Hogan, I can’t say that they are by any means bad comic book writers (I mean I could never do what they do), but for entertainment value, this comic can only be described as swing and a miss.

www.darkhorse.com

Let’s start at the beginning. The Comic opens up to this long description of the journey of some sacred occult text that has the feel of a biblical lineage story. It may as well have been written “tablets begot texts, which begot book, which begot fire, which begot murder, which begot…” until we get to the end point of still knowing nothing about this text other than it’s still lost and it is needed to beat this parasite outbreak. In theory the journey would be interesting and worth finding out about if it weren’t in such a passive voice. It is honestly a waste of space that can be summed up in 1 sentence, “The book is important.”

Now that we know the solution to the main problem of the novel, we are introduced to what the actual problem is. Yes, the solution is revealed before the problem. Turns out, the city of manhattan is overrun with vampires. That’s right, another author suckeling from the tit of vampires before it runs dry; on one hand, at least they are staying with trends, and on the other hand, seriously another vampire story?! Well rest assured, you can just cut both hands off. Here’s the definition of a vampire in this comic: a corpse of a human, taken over by a parasite and looks like a zombie, that mindlessly kills with a razor tongue, with no evidence of actually drinking blood, and is only weakness is the sun. No fangs, no consciousness, nothing about the soul, no weakness to the holy. Catering to (and writing for a blog for) a demographic that grew up Buffy, this parasitic bastardization of a vampire is about as bad as Twilight, there I said it.

Moving past that not-actually-a-vampire issue, we reach a city destroyed by riots with rebel group trying to save everyone cause apparently humanity has lost it’s common sense enough to just say “let’s not try to piss off the thing that is killing everyone.” On top of it all, the protagonist has to fight off his late wife who is now infected and his son wants to hug this decaying bloodthirsty corpse of his mother, because nothing says “hug me” like a murderous zombie. So there are these crazy drones that do nothing but kill for no reason and out of nowhere, there is some leader who miraculously held on the his consciousness and has some diabolical plan, but don’t ask me, I honestly have no clue. As far as the rest of characters go, the little developement they’ve been given hasn’t exactly made me like them. They mostly seem belligerent and blindly following some self proclaimed messiah with a sob-story so they can go down in history as being a part of someone who actually did something when everyone else just ran to their deaths.

www.darkhorse.com

But at least the art redeems it some, right? WRONG! Don’t let the cover fool you, the art leaves something to be desired. The simplicity of the art is on such a level that you can’t actually know what someone properly looks like unless their face is the only thing in the frame. This just makes the characters seem all the more generic.

Overall, I would not recommend this comic for $3.99. Even if the series does end up getting better, this piece seems overall unimportant. Not only that, it just wasn’t enjoyable; it lacked some of the key elements to make a comic good: artwork, dynamic characters with development, plot, etc. I hope the next comic redeems this one, until then I would say skip this one and move on to something more worth your time.

Brendan, know in the weberverse as bigmacd101, is so freaking pumped to write his first “would not recommend” review. He’s kinda scared the the authors might read this, so in case you don’t hear from him in a while, it’s probably because he has gone into hiding. He will let you know he’s alive and safe on his twitter (@bigmacd101) so you can sleep easy.