Sometimes stories get wrapped up in their own premise. With The Nobodies it has an intriguing premise and with this first issue you can tell there is a bigger story at work. The problem is that the story is chomping at the bit to get to that big idea all the while explaining its premise. To be clear though, it’s not a zombie story but it is a post-apocalyptic tale. What ended society as we know it? The Rapture. The story opens 30 Days Later/The Walking Dead style as a man wakes up in a hospital bed with no idea how he got there or what’s going on in the world. We have an instant break in the plot as he falls out of bed unable to walk and find his way to a wheelchair, but then by the second page he’s walking around just fine. He comes across a group of men that have picked up what looks like mother and her child. There’s something clearly wrong with the mother as the lights are on, but no one is home. Our protagonist doesn’t know what’s going on, but he wants to help; before he can do anything though he’s taken out by the butt of a gun.
He wakes up again and finds himself tied to a chair. The old man from before sticks a gun in our yet un-named protagonists face and begins interrogating him. It’s a rather pointless scene because never once does the old man listen to the answers given and feels that he’s almost “broken” the man after only three questions all of which resulted in physical violence.
Long story short Iggy (our protagonist) has woken up twenty years after his last memory and society has ended due to the rapture. The nobodies as they’re called are the left over husks of everyone that was raptured. Iggy is being monitored by unknown people who are using him for some yet unknown purpose. This part could have been more interesting, but with so much being unknown this aspect of the plot fails to grab your interest.
What really harms this story is the opening. The story doesn’t spend any time alone with Iggy after he’s woken up. He just wakes up crawls to a wheelchair and then we find him walking around. I didn’t know why he was confused any more than the characters he was dealing with know why he’s confused. I got that he wasn’t up to speed on everything because the opening is similar to the aforementioned movie and comic, but that was about it.
The thing that instantly lost me and turned me off about this story was the implied rape scene in the beginning. What was worse was the old man who finds Iggy calls him a pervert for “watching” as four men are about to have their way with a women in the middle of a street. I don’t care that within the confines of the story this women is just a husk, if anything that makes it worse. If that wasn’t enough, Iggy goes from enemy to friend with this old man after he helps him kills some other characters later on. I was done with the old man after his first appearance so sticking around with him was not a good experience.
Interesting premise or not, rape ended up being the first thing we experienced with the story and it served no purpose. The men were there to gather up a nobody for a scientist to study, her abduction alone was enough to get Iggy involved. Eventually the story mellows out, but I couldn’t forgive the choppy and inexcusable opening.
For a story like this the opening is the most important aspect of building the plot and interest. Unfortunately The Nobodies chose to rush through the opening to focus on its premise and that hurt it in the long run. This is just my opinion so check it out for yourself.
Score: 2/5
Writer: John Vinson Artist/Inker: Ger Curti Price: $1.99 Release Date: 2/12/14