To say that this series is bad is an understatement. It went from milking cool moments from the movie and turning them into cheap jokes, to delivering a story that is so hollow and unoriginal that as a reader I no longer wanted to explore this world. This world that was once fantastic and dangerous, but offered so much potential. Instead it’s just procedural series in which we read how Snake escapes from whatever situation he’s in… because that’s all he’s allowed to do apparently… escape from stuff… because if he’s not then people are confused right? It’s not worth recapping this issue. He escapes. He gets to go up against the brute of a woman he’s been beaten by too many times to care and he defeats her in the most anticlimactic way possible. Maybe if the art was better it would have been something, but it’s not.
In fact the art is the worse than the story. There’s no personality. Backgrounds are empty or just hollow feeling and all of the characters lack detail to make them real characters. They all look like outlines on the page that someone colored in a flat and muted tone. It does not, I repeat, doesn’t not capture the look and the tone of the film. Flat colors do not equal dark and gritty.
This book could be anything. Other than sharing the name of the character from the film there is nothing else that resembles Escape from New York. You could have called this, “Generic Action Star Gets Out of Trouble” because that’s all it is. As I said in my review for the third issue, this isn’t Snake. This isn’t the world he lives in, this is just some cheap cash-in on the name and the hope of putting out something cool, but the problem is it never takes the world and the subject matter seriously. It’s all for a laugh and I don’t remember laughing at the first film do you?
The art is so bad that it must take a lot of the blame, but not all of it. I don’t know if a better artist would have made this series less shitty. I still think it would have been comedic and cornball which if you watched the first film and hell even the shitty second one… comedic doesn’t come to mind. Cornball definitely applies to the second film, but that’s the one you don’t copy.
I hope Kurt Russell never reads this series because he’d probably hate it more than the rebooted film they’re planning on making.
Score: 1/5
Escape From New York #4 Writer: Christopher Sebela Artist: Diego Barreto Publisher: BOOM! Studios Price: $3.99 Release Date: 3/11/15 Format: Ongoing; Print/Digital