
Advent Comics 2017
Written by Elijah Thomas
Illustrated by Jacob Newell
Lettered by Josh Southall
People I keep telling you time and again how you need to seek out independent and little known publishers and while I realise majority don’t listen to me it isn’t going to stop me from saying it over and over again. I have no idea what’s really going on here but from what I can gather we’re seeing the end of what Willow’s been doing as she’s holded up in a church and the cops, SWAT, are about to bust in and take her down.
So who is Willow and how did she get herself into this situation? Elijah takes us back, not to the beginning but to a time where it seems the catalyst occurred to get her here. We get to see the kind of woman she by her deeds, dialogue and how she treats people. We don’t get to see this kind of opening very often anymore and that we are getting to know the character in such ways makes it even easier for us to really get behind her, care for her and then wonder how on Earth she becomes close to the cop as well as ends up where we start off. She just doesn’t seem the type,
She doesn’t seem the type. He was a great neighbor, kept to himself was always nice and quiet. Never caused any trouble was also so sweet to me. I never would’ve guessed. These are all things people would say about us right? So now more than ever i’m dying to know what Elijah is going to be reveal about Willow that took her from crayons & perfume to murder and mayhem (okay the cops are after her she’s holed up in a church the stretch in my imagination wasn’t a huge leap).
Then there’s Jacob and what he brings to the interiors here. While part of me wishes this were traditionally hand drawn i’m gonna say it isn’t. It isn’t strong enough to have been mastered online drawing but for pencil drawing it would be up there with the best. A combination of the two wouldn’t be terrible if the backgrounds were computer generated and the people not so much. I will say though that I do like what i’m seeing here. The characters are great, have the right amount of emotion from their faces and look like real people we’d meet on the street. The way page layouts are used through angles, perspective and the utilisation of backgrounds is extremely well done.
This is an amazingly good, strong first issue. We see where things are supposed to go and how they start off. So we’re left with that wide open grey area of how things got from A to Z and it’s that journey which we want to know about. From the premise of the book, which coincidentally i’m not all that sure of BUT doesn’t bother me in the slightest, to it’s execution through story development and pacing this issue has already cemented my curiosity and desire to come back and see how events are going to unfold.
What event could have happened to have irrevocably changed how Willow sees life and how does that tie into the mysterious Rose whom we met this issue and Sawyer whom we see but haven’t had a chance to have developed yet?
You can find Advent titles at Amazon, Comixology, Drivethrucomics, Indyplanet and kindle. I would rather have hard copies myself they are really much more fun to read but with this variety there’s a way for everyone to get on board!