By Dustin Cabeal

After a mix-up on my part, I felt it was only fair to get this issue reviewed before the second issue arrives next week. I had been looking forward to it since I enjoy Dave Dwonch’s other comics like Double Jumpers and Cyrus Perkins and the Haunted Taxi Cab. He’s said multiple times in interviews and through the marketing of Infinite 7 that this is his love note to the 80s and action movie genre. Which isn’t hard to figure out with that Arnold Schwarzenegger looking dude on the cover, but let’s not forget the Bruce Lee clone and Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken.

The issue starts with Anthony and our action movie homages on a plane ready to jump into a mission. We don’t know the mission or really who the characters are, and that’s why the story rewinds to a month before. Not my favorite opening, but it is effective in giving you a taste of what’s to come and shows all the characters that Anthony will be interacting with throughout the course of the series.

In the past, we see Anthony’s mundane life. He’s just a kid raising himself since his parents are nowhere to be found. Anthony continues in his mundane existence but manages to land a date with his crush later on. From there the story follows Smash Brannagan, who is the Snake Plisken homage from the cover. He and the Bruce Lee homage are on a mission fighting robots and the undead. Smash is chasing a woman from his past that used him to get info for her evil organization. She continues to tell him that she felt jack and shit for him, but he’s kind of a sensitive guy. So sensitive that later on he goes chasing a lead without any backup and ends up in Anthony’s house.

The pacing is just okay; I wish it was better. It might have been a little easier to follow if we saw the majority of Smash’s story first and then went to Anthony’s and had both characters meet up at the end still, as it is the action gets broken up because of the back and forth. I didn’t like Smash as a character. He didn’t come across like the character he was homaging, which is fine, but ended up being very whiny and annoying. Especially at the end. I did really like the twists, and I think there’s going to be some head fuckery in the next issue, at least I hope there is, due to the consequences of Anthony’s actions.

As for the artwork, I’m really on the fence about it, but only because of the coloring. There was a strange inconsistency to the coloring that changed how the artwork was perceived. Sometimes it was clean and vibrant, other times it looked like Danny Miki coloring Jim Lee’s work with that water coloring thing he does. It’s almost like a feather has been run over the entire thing. The second type of coloring didn’t match the artwork or the tone of the story, and it bounced between the two a lot. It made it difficult to appreciate the artwork, which had a nice style and didn’t borrow too heavily from the characters it was homaging.

I’m very curious to read more, but I’m afraid that the coloring is going to be a continued issue that I deal with while reading the series. I hope not, but comics are completed months in advance, and I’m already a month behind on my review. We’ll see, at the very least I’m intrigued enough to keep reading and see what other nostalgia Dwonch can work into Infinite 7.

Score: 3/5

Infinite 7 #1
Action Lab – Danger Zone