By Dustin Cabeal

There was an eerie feeling that I had read or seen this story before, but for the life of me, I can’t place it. To give myself a piece of mind I settled on the potential fact that it could just be wearing its influences on its sleeve.

Speaking of the pacing, it’s tight. There’s a very natural flow to the story that carries you all the way to the ending. The story follows a few dudes in exo-suits in space. Who they’re fighting wasn’t crystal clear to me, but it seemed like protestors. During this all, one of the men is having some moral conflicts. To balance this is a series of flashbacks showing that while he’s not husband or father of the year, he still has a conscious and questions about their mission.

The reason this story felt so familiar to me was that I figured out the ending almost instantly. There’s a strong chance that you will too, and I don’t particularly think the writer was trying to hide it. It felt like it was going for more of a focus on the journey to the ending. It makes it there, but again it was all too familiar, and so the journey wasn’t particularly special. That and the flashbacks really show that this guy sucks. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s all about himself which makes his current journey and predicament hard to empathize with him.

The artwork is clever. There are several panels that spice up the visuals as the story bounces back and for the between the future and the past. There’s never any dialogue in the past, just narration that runs throughout the issue, which leaves the art to tell the story in the past. It does quite well. Granted, it’s given some pretty general “self-absorbed dad” moments, but it does what it can. The exo-suit are damn ugly. I wish I could say it another way, but as a guy that loves exo-suits and their overall designs, I couldn’t get into the ones here. I mean all you have to do to destroy them is shoot for the midsection and that’s just poor design. They could have been cool is all I’m saying.

Parent/Guardian is okay. I know that doesn’t sound like I’m jumping for joy, but with the amount of indie comics I’ve read recently and won’t even bother reviewing due to their quality problems, an “okay” from me means something at this point. I don’t know if I have any interest in reading more of the world, but I did enjoy this issue enough to make it to the end, regardless of how familiar it felt to me while I journeyed there.

Score: 3/5

Parent/Guardian
Writer/Inker/Letterer: Kyle Roberts
Artist: Rafael Romeo Magat
Self-Published