Part of the deal of being a reviewer is that comics sort of get dropped in my lap from time to time, coming in through mail or meeting someone at a Con or what-have-you. This means wading through a lot of well-meaning but amateur comics, some truly awful books and the occasional gem. The Wannabe isn't quite polished enough to be a gem, but I see the glint of something special, and I'm definitely curious to see where the tale goes from here. Hollmer's story meanders a bit, and his strong central concept (looking at a vigilante through a more real-world lens) takes too long to coalesce, so it's hard to recommend on a single-issue basis, but if the story gains a little more focus, the talent and the ideas are certainly there.
The first thing that can put me (and by extension, any potential new reader) off of a new indy book is amateurish artwork. Most don't expect anything up to the polished standards of industry veterans from DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse and the rest, but it's nice when you see someone who is clearly on the upper end of the learning curve. In this department, The Wannabe is blessed with Courtney Huddleston, someone who has done a fair share of artwork in comics before. Huddleston's work has a clean, attractive style, and the best feature of it is the distinctive faces that he draws. It's a style that reminds me somewhat of Oni mainstay Mike Norton, as well as the work done by Fade From Blue's Scott Dalrymple.
It is the story of The Wannabe that really drew me in, however. Back in the '90s, Steve Gerber wrote an update of Marvel's Foolkiller that presented vigilante behavior in a more unflinching light than is usually seen in comics. The Wannabe seems to take off from that same ethos, as our lead character witnesses his pregnant wife killed by a Russian mobster (hey, maybe this Hollmer guy has a future at DC Comics! I kid, I kid!) and drifts aimlessly through life until he settles on a vigilante lifestyle. There's a particularly effective panel where we see the lead character's "laundry list" of how to be a vigilante that drives home a more realistic approach to the notion, and it's that panel more than anything else that intrigued me about the story.
Unfortunately, the story takes a while to get to that point. Hollmer's writing is entertaining, so it's not painful or boring to watch Erik enjoying his happy life and vacation, or descending into office tedium, but it's sort of beyond the point, and Hollmer spends about twice the time necessary on these elements that is needed to establish them. The result is a story that really has barely gotten started by the end, and that's death for mainstream books in this market, let alone a new indy book. I'm also more than a little disturbed that pregnant women getting killed seems to be becoming an industry staple (The Flash, Identity Crisis and Wannabe are three examples off the top of my head), but that might just be over-sensitivity on my part. At any rate, it's at least slightly more appropriate in the context of this story, which doesn't purport to feature superheroes or anything of that nature. It would be easier to swallow if Hollmer's writing style were a little more gritty by nature, but his writing has a conversational, lightweight tone that makes it seem more like we're reading a relationship comic than something more akin to The Punisher. It's a good, strong style, and that juxtaposition of style and subject matter is at least part of what I like about the book, but I'm not sure it will work in the long-term.
In the long-term is the key question for The Wannabe. Because what we've got here is a solidly-produced but unspectacular first half of the first act, not enough to qualify as a full story and not so great in execution that the partial story didn't bother me. However, if future issues of The Wannabe take the story in a compelling direction, move a little bit faster and build on the foundation established here, this could be an unusual look at vigilantism. 6/10
