Review: Crossover #1
[Editor’s Note: This review may contain spoilers]
Writer: Donny Cates
Artist: Geoff Shaw
Colors: Dee Cunniffe
Letters: John J. Hill
Reviewed by: Seth Singleton
Summary
In Crossover #1, Superheroes have come alive in the actual world. Everything we understand is changing, and it now connects three strangers in a world that places them all at risk.
Crossover is a story about what we will believe even when what we believe can be dangerous. As the author puts it too much better than I could, stop believing in something even when the whole world tells you that you’re wrong.
Positives
So often the key to the first issue is world-building, and this story makes a point of connecting all the things we know my world into the first four pages. The result is a haunting reminder of how fragile we are and the dangerous temptations of the worlds we imagine.
The narrator is a treat. Every character referenced by the narrator and some of them the narrator points to directly. If only to say, “Stop and look. You won’t want to miss this!”
The first is Ellie who dresses in Cosplay, works at a comic store, and distressed by strangers driving by and protesters outside her shop. The next is the son of a pastor or a reverend who drives a pickup truck, combs his hair like a greaser, eats sandwiches, and challenges his son to throw a Molotov cocktail to atone for the sin of possessing a comic book. His name is Ryan Lowe.
The last character is a child named Ava. She just crossed over and she’s scared. And it’s clear she has reason to when the shop burns around them.
Negatives
None found.
Verdict
Writer Donny Cates drops the reader into a present-day that is still recovering three years after heroes broke through to our actual world, in Denver, Colorado. It bases the malevolence in the tensions-playing out on television and on digital screens every day. The fear is genuine, the characters connected, and the risks as high as the reader can count.
The deal-breaker is it this is a story about hope in about love. If any story has a chance at surviving and being more than just words on the page, it is often because their foundation is hope, love, or both. To paraphrase a brilliant line from a great show, for the first time in history hope and love might have a fighting chance.
