REVIEW: The Nekros Part One: Nightfall

Summary

My favorite thing about The Nekros is the design of the titular monster. The cyclopean horror is first seen as a training dummy with an anglerfish grin and mocking gesture standing tall and proud over the warriors training to slay it. The team behind this book has done a great job creating a terrifying creature that looks great when it finally makes its full appearance.

Another thing I think the team behind this book should be given credit for is that it has a lot of dynamic action and some pretty solid fight scenes. I never found myself confused about what was happening on the page or what order the panels should be read in.

That said I do have some major gripes with this book. 

The lettering is easy to read most of the time but there is a panel in this book with some narration that I found pretty much impossible to read. I was also confused about who was saying this and why?

I also feel like this issue isn’t really complete despite being twenty-eight pages. I will give D.C. Burton credit for the fact that they do set up the pieces of the larger narrative like what The Nekros is, why the main character Mathias wants to stop it, and the problems in Mathias’s personal life. However, I still feel like this issue just cuts off more that it concludes an actual chapter of the story.

My last major gripe is with the protagonist Mathias. Mathias is capable, tough, and top of his Nekros hunting class but it seems like most of his peers think he’s a jerk and I’m inclined to agree with them. While Mathias does have a touching moment with his mentor that explains why he acts so angry and arrogant I still feel like this issue really lacks a moment where Mathias endears himself to the audience by saving someone or putting his life on the line.

Altogether, I think this is a decent book with some cool ideas that shows a lot of promise and that I would be willing to read another issue or two to see if it gets better. I pretty much gave this book a three in all categories in the scoring section and that is pretty much the score I would give it overall. There are some big problems with this first issue, but I think it is well within this team’s ability to address them and come out with even stronger work in the future.