Not every story is going to be great. I know that’s kind of a shitty way to start this review, but it’s true. Armageddon was not a good read. The amount of story that takes place across its nineteen pages could have been greatly condensed and conveyed the same message. Part of me wondered if it was because I didn’t read the first issue, but I seriously doubt that based on the structure of this tale. The story follows a pure soul that somehow ended up in hell (that might be in the first issue, but it’s talked about a lot in this issue), but now he’s there and the devil wants to show that even a pure soul can be corrupted. I’m not sure how much it takes to show his corruption, but he kills demons mercilessly. He narrates and is torture and fights throughout the entire issue. Somehow he ends up on earth… or possible is always on earth? And comes across a woman about to be killed by two demons; later it’s revealed that the demons were attempting to kill her before the man and women met. That’s revealed after they have a long conversation with each other. She shows compassion to him and he doesn’t understand it and then they go their separate ways; him giving the classic, “stay away from me” and her of course longing for him.
The main character narrates the story and he seems just as confused as I was when reading the story. Even a simple line of narration saying how he got there would have been nice; the saying goes “every comic is someone’s first comic” and that really implies that you never know when someone is going to read a particular issue, so you can’t always count on them having read anything prior.
I’m fairly certain that the story shows us possible future outcomes that the character sees and it muddles up the story. Mostly because it’s never really explained and the art never makes the distinction between reality and his visions. The result is what looks like a bunch of jump cuts in the story that may or may not have some relation to each other.
As many shortcomings as the story has, the art unfortunately has more. There is no consistency to the art. The main characters face is shown over and over on the several pages and your instincts as a reader informs you that it’s the same character, but your eyes will question what all these blonde haired men are doing hanging out in hell and why none of them have the same nose. A messed up nose isn’t that big of a deal, but when you show a close up on a characters face and it was either never drawn or the inking covered it with shadows from a light source that doesn’t exist… well it really breaks from anything the story was trying to do.
Maybe the story isn’t the bad and I was just distracted by the artwork, but in my opinion they were both struggling. The story struggles to get it’s point across and make the tired, oh so very tired, Armageddon storyline come across to the reader; while the art struggles to keep up and never really does.
I know that we promote independent comics a lot around here, we do like them, but that doesn’t mean that we love them all. Unfortunately Armageddon offered very little to love.
Score: 1/5
Writer: Nathan Wozniak Artist: Henry Simon Publisher: R-Comics Price: $0.99 Website