Written and created by Jamie Me
Art by Toni Doya
Colours by Sean Callahan
Available through Vault29 | £3.50 | Full Colour
NOTE: Adult and Maure Themes
The Story: Start Again is a superhero boy meets girl comic set in the United Kingdom. It follows a chance encounter between Ajay Verna and Natalie Brown in a nightclub in Leeds city centre. You know how it goes. Boy meets girl, girl likes boy, but boy is a superhero and didn’t tell girl, so there is that…
It deals with themes such as anxiety, online abuse and the cost of fame. The story itself is inspired by some of the authors experiences.
The Review: I really liked this comic from the start. I read it without a clue what it was about and found it to be a funny story about a superhero finding and possibly losing love. It has some great looking, realistic style art that flows exceedingly nicely and carries all the action and facial acting that the writer seemingly needed. It is a solid and well made superhero tale with a modern twist on the genre. It also has some exceptionally presented scenes of “adult entertainment”.
Start Again #1 has all the elements you find in all good first issues. It pulls you through a solid set up, moments of surprise and sets it up all nicely for a longer run, with a little surprise at the end. The characters are likeable when required to be and talk in natural and familiar modern language. Toni Dora was a cracking choice for artist and gives the characters individuality and Leeds (yes, our own Thought Bbubble hosting Leeds) a sense of scale.
I rarely double dip on small press issues but will be looking for a physical copy later this week.
I found it really refreshing that the aforementioned themes of anxiety and online abuse weren’t used too heavily. Recently we seem to be getting a lot of heavy handed, too on the nose and “woe is me” comics about anxiety. This first issue makes use of a solid story footing and realistically rendered (albeit super-powered) people to talk about that subject.
In a post modern twist it reminds me of what Stan and co were doing with Spider-Man and The X-Men all those decades ago. There’s a sense of real and genuinely felt emotional depth to the script, not greeting card slogans or depressing diary notations.
I really hope that the second issue is hot on the heels of the first as this sort of story needs that regular pacing through a monthly schedule. The cover to the second issue looks cracking and can be seen in the end credits.
As an aside, I would note that the first issue,s cover seems well formatted but fails a little to represent the interiors – but to be fair, we comics fans are rather used to that?
• Start Again #1 is published by Vault29 and available at www.vault29.co.uk – a British company supporting independent comic creators
• Follow the writer Jamie Me at www.comicbookhour.com or on Twitter @JamieMeWrites
• Toni Doya is a Spanish artist and who brilliantly cannot be found on Twitter
• Sean Callahan can be found at www.callahancolor.deviantart.com and on Twitter @CallahanColors
Many thanks for reading.
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Antony Esmond is a comic reviewer and writer – his hips don’t lie.
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