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In my never-ending quest to find new and exciting comic books that I might otherwise not have found a few years ago, I picked up Rapture #1 and #2 by Dark Horse Comics, and finally got around to reading them. They are by the talented Mike Avon Oeming and Taki Soma. Has anyone else checked this out?
I’ve been following Oeming for years via Powers, which is fantastic, and now Mice Templar, which is also terrific. He has a very unique art style that at first takes a little time getting used to. Its slightly cartoony but Oeming is about as adult as you can get—there tends to be a lot of violence, gore, nudity and sex in his art. I’ve actually come to grow fond of it over the years, so seeing it here was more of a plus than anything (people new to his art might feel differently). As for his writing, from what I’ve seen its usually pretty good as well, though there is some room for improvement. As for Taki Soma, I really don’t know much about her other than she’s Oeming’s wife and buddies with Bendis and that whole crew, and so sometimes I’ll see her name in articles and stuff for when Bendis and his whole group act like a big fraternity instead of creative business (not knocking it, its just how they come off in interviews whether by accident or design).
Anyway, as to Rapture, the basic premise that I can surmise so far is it’s a post-Apocalyptic world in which the superheroes have basically done the same thing a US / USSR thermo-nuclear war would have done. Now they are all gone and the regular people need to cope with it. The two lead characters are two young people who were in love but now are on opposite sides of the US, desperately hoping to find each other, although their final moments together were their actual break-up. There is also an interesting plot about the female perhaps becoming a new “Champion” (the series word for Super-Hero, since other publishers besides Marvel and DC can’t use it).
All in all, its pretty good so far. But I’m still waiting to see just how good it will be—enough to get me to buy #3 and maybe #4 but by then I need to decide if I’m sticking with it or dropping it. The problem is I’ve read so many of these types of stories before that I constantly need something new to keep me exciting. They kind of have done that, but I still need a little more ‘oomph’. I’ll admit, I knew almost nothing about it when I impulsive bought it and once I saw more superheroes in it, I was disappointed—I basically read DC and Marvel’s entire lines, so I get enough superheroes already; of course, if it’s a superhero story that is excellent, I can always use another really fantastic comic book.
So, I’m wondering if anyone else knows anything about the series or checked it out? Like I said, I’ll give it a little more time and see where it takes me. It feels more like a horror comic than anything else and if anything, it kind of reminds me of something like Stephen King’s “The Stand”, if instead of the Captain Trips virus, it was a superhero Armageddon that wiped out most of the world.
From: If you don't want my peaches, honey... | Registered: Sep 2003
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