Resurrect walks a fine line between familiar and new. It’s hard to say definitively that it’s “like this” or “like that” when it could be like anything dealing with dreams and people coming to get you via said dreams. I mean a lot of stories start that way. The Matrix basically starts that way so there’s no clean comparison to any other story, but rather a shared idea of a character tapping a higher level of being that involves a dreamscape of sorts. The character we follow is Jacob. He’s living off his dead wife’s insurance money because he misses her and feels guilt since she died while he was cheating on her. Now he gets drunk and sleeps all day and hey… I don’t blame him. No one blames him.
The problem is he’s having some really strange dreams. One of which is disturbed by someone knocking at his door. The dude tells him that he’s aware of him and if he needs help to call him. It’s very strange and abrupt, but Jacob brushes it off and goes back to sleep and dreams of his dead wife. He ends up sleeping with her in the dream, but that’s when things get weird and she turns into some strange looking creature. Jacob freaks out and calls the dude and things get weirder as the creature is actually on Jacob’s side and ends up helping him unlock some kind of dormant power. Too bad there’s now two dudes trying to kill him and the creature… that he just slept with, let’s not forget that.
Really once Jacob calls the dude back, who got all of ten feet away from his apartment by the way, that’s when the issue picks up. I liked it after that. The opening was stale and reminded me of a dream sequence from an anime in which something similar will likely happen later in the story.
The part with the random dude showing up was jarring to say the least. The story may have picked up at this point, but it was still an inexcusable story device. Why anyone would call someone that basically showed up and said, “let me know if things get weird” is beyond me. That’s not what you do. You call the cops, you call a friend, you call a cab, you do not call a stranger that showed up randomly and foreshadowed what was going to happen to you. Why? Because how can you trust that? You can’t and Jacob was dumb for doing so.
The writing struggles. The opening really feels like filler because it doesn’t do anything but tease where the story is going. Which would be fine if this was a few issues later, but I don’t know what’s happening in this world and that made me more confused when the rest of the story was nothing like it. The dialogue is pretty cheesy when it’s not exposition. I think the creator would have benefitted from hearing how it sounded out loud because it’s pretty goofy when you read it that way.
The art doesn’t really illustrate a lot. We mostly see Jacob and his apartment and a lot of white or black backgrounds with some occasionally “disturbing” images. Really the only thing that’s mature about the story is the weird sex scene, but even then it’s not that mature. The art isn’t bad per say, there’s a lot of room for improvement, but it does have some skill. It’s just not a style that I’m particularly fond of. There’s some grey scale used with the issue which seems out of place with the rest of the art, especially on the pages with white backgrounds.
It’s readable. I know that sounds mean, but I’ve read a lot of indie comics lately and some of them I couldn’t make it past the first few pages because of how bad it was. Resurrect isn’t that bad, but it needs a lot of work. I get what the story is about, but the structure of the story leaves something to be desired. If you enjoy stories that deal with dreamscape and has a slight Darkness element to it, then give it a shot.
Score: 2/5
Resurrect #1 Creator: M.A. del Rosario Publisher: Pen & Paper Drawing Studios Price: $1.99 Format: Ongoing; Digital
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