Comic review: Savior #1- Pretentious, tired, old, smelly and flat

Story: Todd McFarlane & Brian Holguin
Art: Clayton Crain
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 8th April 2015



There are so many things about this book that annoy the heck out of me, so many that I don’t even know where to start, but I do know this for a fact.

I’m going to enjoy slogging this one off.

Yeah, I know that sounds mean-spirited of me, but I’m sorry. I’ve just been served up a turd sandwich, taken a big optimistic bite of it and spat it out all over my carpet. The sandwich was bloody awful, and I want to tell everybody all about it. I want to moan. I want to vent. I want to warn anybody else who might be tempted into taking a bite of this monstrosity.

DON’T.

IT TASTES LIKE DOG ****.

The book begins with a television visual trope of a bird pecking at roadkill. It then moves onto another television trope, the moment of violence, that ends mid scene to be replaced by a ‘Six-Month’s Earlier’ panel. The idea is to get you excited with violence, and to then rewind the story and give you all of the boring stuff that preceded it.  So far, so formulaic, the book is reading like a screenplay for a television show or at least a pitch for one. Ho-hum.

From formulaic it gets pretentious and annoying REAL fast. The plot switches to ace female reporter Lois Lane (or whatever her name is) lecturing and patronising a bunch of school kids by basically telling them that they are going to live their lives with closed minds, only going to Internet sites that talk about the President being an alien and the Moon landings being a hoax. Err, what Internet sites is she talking about? I’m the ‘conspiracy’ comic book guy and I can’t EVER recall seeing any Internet site that claims the President is an alien. A globalist puppet fraud perhaps? But not an alien, that’s a new one on me.

And the moon landing hoax thing is so old and irrelevant now that I can’t even remember the last time that anybody talked about it. This ace female reporter is supposed to be some young up and comer in her early twenties, so how come she sounds like a fifty-year-old guy who is scared of the Internet?

She then goes on to make the case that because people have more choice on the Internet that means that they are really dumb and never look at any alternative points of view to the ones they already have. Yeah, I agree with that, but that’s exactly what television news does as well, and if this ace reporter works for the mainstream media herself it will be exactly what she herself is doing. She will know her audience, and pander to it in order to climb her skinny arse up the corporate pole. If she doesn’t then career over and yet here she is lecturing kids like she is some sort of independent voice who is only looking for the truth. I call BULL**** on that one.

If she really were an independent voice looking for truth then she wouldn’t be on the mainstream media at all, she’d be an independent journalist doing her own thing, not following the well trodden corporate whore path, but making her own.

The point I’m making here, rather long-windedly, is that the heroine protagonist of this story is a fraud, and I don’t buy her for one single second. She is portrayed as a heroine, but what she would actually be in the real world is a part of a discredited and dying dinosaur disinformation system that is being wiped out by independent, truth seeking journalists on the Internet.

I can’t read a comic book where I despise the supposed heroine protagonist, but what about the story? Is it any good? Nope, it’s horrible. This ace reporter (after patronising everybody in the small town where she grew up with her smug, self-satisfied ‘success’ story) then finds herself bang in the middle of a huge story as an airliner conveniently crash lands about ten yards away from her car. Don’t worry, she’s not hurt. After a unconvincing attempt at pretending she cares about injured passengers she goes straight into ace reporter mode, picks up her camera and, get ready for the cliché, witnesses a miracle. It’s Jesus, the Second Coming, he’s saving people, and this is impossible.

That’s it. That’s all you’re going to get in Savior #1.

This is tired old repackaged Hollywood nonsense.  Savior is one of those stories that you read and think; ‘I’ve read this one before haven’t I?’ The answer to that question is, YES. You’ve certainly seen it before, probably a thousand-times over in fact. I remember seeing one that had Bruce Willis in it.

That movie (Unbreakable) wasn’t exactly applauded for it’s originality when it was first released, and all you are going to get in this comic book is another twist on that uninspired old idea.

There is nothing here. It’s lazy, outdated, and woefully lacking in the ideas department. I don’t care if issue #2 is the best book in the world, because I won’t be reading it. This debut turd of an issue has killed any interest I could ever have in the story.

There was nothing about this book that I liked, absolutely nothing. It’s pretentious recycled bog rolls wrapped up with some vague 90’s Internet and religion guff. A total waste of time from beginning to end, Savior #1 is a turd sandwich so pungent, so gross, so awful that it needs to be wrapped up in an air-tight bag and flushed away as soon as possible.



Rating: 1/10 (Pretentious old codswallop)