I’ve gone back and forth with AfterShock titles. I’ll find one I like, one I don’t. The Revisionist falls in the middle. If you couldn’t guess from the cover and the title, it’s a story about time travel, which is a genre that I’ve read a lot lately and have lost interest in. I’m seeing the same glimmers of influence from the movie Primer, over and over again. That isn’t to say that you won’t enjoy The Revisionist, but that it wasn’t for me and did very little to win me over. [su_quote]Synopsis: We’re in the future and a dude is killing targets. Now we’re in the past and the same dude is in prison. He’s about to get out though because he’s a model prisoner. Too bad his female guard friend is killed in front of him for being a rat and he has to fish a gift out of the trash that his crazy dad sent him. Cue the time travel music and stuff.[/su_quote]
That’s really all that happens in this first issue. I wish I enjoyed it, but I didn’t. The death of the guard was so painfully obvious in the exposition dialogue that she shared with the main character that I wondered why both characters weren’t looking over their shoulders more. The opening was for shock and awe for the series because it’s never mentioned or addressed in the rest of the issue. That’s a pretty common comic device but not one I’m willing to compliment. It’s like opening an episode of a police procedural with a dead body. You mean they’re going to solve a crime this episode? Gasp.
The dialogue was mostly exposition. There was so little that wasn’t that it’s probably safe to say that all the characters are just telling you what you need to know rather than letting you figure any of it out. No one is likable and really you don’t get a sense of anyone. Not the main character, not his crazy dad, no one. They’re just people in a time travel story.
The art is gritty and with thick line work. Not a lot of facial details and what I can only describe as too much and too little detail. Things are detailed, but aspects of them are unfinished and overall it wasn’t pleasant to the eye. The faces were all over the place. On the same page the characters could look completely different and several pages look rushed compared to the rest of the book. The coloring does what it can, but it’s flat and muted. I don’t know if that was at the request of the creators, but it makes the book look dull. The coloring looks like a bad fit for the style and nothing about it or the artwork in general screams “Sci-Fi.”
If you like time travel stories then you might dig this one. I didn’t. Maybe I’ve seen and read too many lately to get interested in this one or maybe it just didn’t have anything interesting about it. I can see others really liking this book though, I don’t know why they would, but that’s not for me to decide. It’s pretty average in every column and that’s what I’ll pass along to you before you pick it up for a read.
[su_box title="Score: 3/5" style="glass" box_color="#8955ab" radius="6"]
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