‘Killraven’ – Alan Davis & Mark Farmer (Marvel)

The reason I’ve been mostly concentrating on comics from Dark Horse and Image (ok, mostly Dark Horse) is that not only do my favourite comic books come from these publishers but I’ve also found that their stories are a hell of a lot easier to get into than those from Marvel and DC. I mentioned it before but it feels like there’s just too much back story to get caught up in sometimes. At least that’s what I thought until Sue came home from the library with a couple of comic books for me (thanks Sue!) It always seems to escape my notice but Marvel’s output isn’t just limited to the big superheroes and mutants that we all know and love (even if the size of the back catalogue scares us to death!) There’s a whole load of lesser known characters out there to be checked out. Take ‘Killraven’ for instance...
In the near future, Martians have invaded the Earth once more and this time the humble germ has totally failed to stop them gaining a foothold on the planet and settling in for good. This time it’s the turn of humanity to stand up and take their planet back but how can they do this when the Martians hold the upper hand in terms of technology? One man is prepared to try regardless of this and the advantage he holds is that he was trained as a gladiator by the very people he will take the war to. Enter Killraven...

The original ‘Killraven’ was actually published way back in the seventies and what I’ve been reading instead is Alan Davis’ 2002 rewrite of the original series (collecting issues one to six). According to Wikipedia it’s an alternate version of the original that’s set in one of the many alternate Earths of the Marvel universe. I’m not going to go too deeply into that because not only is something that I don’t know much about, I also know that going down that route will make my head hurt...

‘Killraven’ is heavy on spectacle and action and this made the whole thing a guaranteed page turner as far as I was concerned. There is so much going on that I had to keep reading so that I could take it all in. One thing that I’ve realised though is that I like my comic art to stand out from the pack a little; just so I feel like I reading something that’s different and had a little effort put into it (I’m thinking Eric Powell and Kyle Hotz in particular). I didn’t get that feeling from Davis’ art which left me feeling that I may as well have just dived into any one of the other Marvel comics that I’ve read in the past. There’s nothing wrong with it but it didn’t really do anything different... Does all Marvel artwork have to be the same? Gregory Wright’s colours did rescue things though, injecting a sense of vibrancy and urgency into the proceedings that kept things moving nicely.

As far as the story goes, well... I guess if I had to sum it up in four words it would be ‘entertaining but somehow flat’. Can something even be entertaining but flat at the same time? I think so, it definitely was here.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that these first six issues are setting things up for events to come as well as trying to swiftly get readers up to speed regarding what has gone before. It felt to me that too much attention had been paid to these two areas and as a result we only get brief glimpses of what is happening right now. This imbalance meant that ‘Killraven’ has a lot of potential that went unrealised. What you do get is entertaining enough but it felt like it could have been a lot more.

The characters we get to spend time with don’t really help matters either as their circumstances have led them all to be in serious need of development in one way or another. On the one hand you can’t really blame the opening issues of a series for having under-developed characters as you’re expecting them to be built up over the course of a long series. On the other hand though, you can quite reasonably expect your characters to be a little more developed than they were here. Killraven and his team may have only known killing in the arena but they come across as unwilling to connect with their new surroundings in anything but the most stereotypical ways. If they don’t want to connect then why should we...? The story may be an exciting one but that sense of detachment makes it a tough one to get into.

I could see myself digging out the old ‘Killraven’ comics on the basis of what I read here but felt like this version could have done a lot more to impress me. Like Michael Bay’s ‘Transformers’ movies, Alan Davis’ ‘Killraven’ is entertaining enough on the surface but has nothing going on underneath...

Six and Three Quarters out of Ten