A Force To Be Reckoned With
By: Andrew Hines
I've been an Image/Top Cow fan for a long while. I'm talking since the beginning of The Darkness, back in '96 and WildC.A.T.s before that in '92. The former is also the length of time I've been a Marc Silvestri fan. They'vd always managed to have really dark sic-fi type characters. Cyber Force is no different, save for the fact that it's one of the very few teams in the Top Cow universe. I'm especially a fan of characters like Aphrodite V, Cyblade and Ripclaw. The fact that this first issue is free certainly doesn't hurt anything. Yeah, that's right. FREE. Rethinking whether to pick it up now, huh?
The writing by Silvestri and Matt Hawkins is a good start for anyone who's not all that familiar with the team. The pacing is good and it introduces most of the characters in one fell swoop. I like that it keeps a more suspenseful tone in the beginning, but gives way to more of an action-adventure/fantasy tale. For including nearly everyone in the first issue, it does a good job of not straying too far from the core elements of the story. The dialogue isn't the greatest I've ever seen, but it does the trick. There's slightly more expository dialogue than necessary, but at least it's not George Perez' Superman scripts. Thankfully the narrators do a great job of setting up what we'll be seeing in the future.
The art by Khoi Pham is pretty damned good. Not Silvestri good, but close enough. He gets the different looks of the characters down, with the necessary updates as required. Sal Regla's inks aren't nearly as heavy as what you might see in darker titles, such as Darkness and Witchblade, but it's actually pretty balanced. Sunny Gho's colors are really good, as he keeps the effects specific to each character. Where Heatwave and Impact seem much more battle damaged, Cyblade and Ares prime appear fairly polished. I mean, just look at the dome on that dude. It's somewhat similar to Silvestri's work without really looking as though he's copying it. I really like the character designs the backgrounds too. I haven't really said much about those, because this is the first time I can't see the characters any other way.
This is a good start to a promising series. I give it an "A-", based solely on the fact that I know something better is just around the corner. It's a great jumping-on point for anyone who was ever curious about Cyber Force.
