I'll be honest... I wasn't paying close attention when I ordered this one-shot. All I needed to know is that it was an AiT/Planet Lar release. I didn't notice it was written by publisher and Astronauts in Trouble writer Larry Young himself, or that it was the publisher's first foray into color comics. And it didn't matter... all those elements are perks, after all. What I should have noticed, though, was that this wasn't so much a new comic title from AiT/Planet Lar, but the comic-book equivalent of a movie teaser trailer. Young's premise is fascinating, full of action yet founded on intelligent supposition, but this book just sets the stage for the real story. The art is inconsistent and disappointing overall, but Young provides some interesting insight into the characters and structure of the blacktop backdrop.
Five decades from now, America finds a solution to its social and infrastructure problems: the Black Diamond. It's a massive eight-lane highway, propped up storeys above the regular world, where people are free to push their cars to triple-digit speeds. A different kind of world has arisen on the Black Diamond. The underbelly of society now finds itself on the massive highway above America's heads, so it's not the safest of places, as one San Francisco orthodontist is about to find out.
Proctor's art is an odd mix of almost photorealism and crude, indy-flavored linework that stands out for more for its flaws than its uniqueness. There are times when I'm really impressed with the unusual mix of surreal colors and grounded, gritty art, but there are others when I find it impossible to make out what the artist is trying to convey. The chase scenes were particularly troublesome.
The script posed a couple of problems as well. Young peppers the dialogue with multiple voices interspersed with one another, trying to capture the rhythm of a conversation. He succeeds, but it's also difficult to follow that conversation. Nevertheless, the core concept here is a strong one, and Young sets the scene brilliantly with strong narration. The action is engrossing, and there's a decent level of tension establishing while a lighter sense of humor makes its way into the mix as well.
The Black Diamond isn't the only upcoming Ait/Planet Lar release that's spotlighted in this comic book. A few pages of the sultry noir action of Smoke and Guns, by newcomers Kirsten Baldock and Fabio Moon, is to be found here, and it's certainly whetted my appetite for more. There's only one page and a full-page ad teeing up Matt Fraction and Steven Sanders's Five Fists of Science, but I can't wait to see how Fraction plans to transform Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain into action heroes. 6/10
