Usually, a new Giffen series is reason to celebrate. They always end long before they should thanks to miserable sales, but fun and quirky books like Vext and The Heckler are unusual treats while they last. Unfortunately, Dominion is of a different stripe than Giffen's usual fare, more like his Legion work influenced by the bastard super-hero movement epitomized by The Authority and The Ultimates, and it's not an easy or all that enjoyable read, at least for me. The story jumps around in time, and from character to character, and while the general tone is clear, the overall story really isn't.
Either Giffen knows something about the future or he has something against Australia, because this is at least the second time that Australia has been invaded and decimated by alien invaders. Specifically, the aliens in Dominion seem to have transformed people into amoral, super-powerful beings that are using Brisbane as their own personal playground. Or the people were amoral already, and the power is what the aliens provided. Either way, combine the "strongest survive" ethos of Road Warrior with the over-the-top violence of The Authority and the soap operatics of Dynasty and you've got a pretty good idea what's going on here.
At least, you've got a pretty good idea in general, because the specifics aren't that clear. A frustrated office worker named Donald is one of the primary players, but his agenda and most of his personality other than his violent and misogynist tendencies are left unclear. Ditto for the various women characters who dot the pages, sometimes serving as little more than a visual and a masochistic focus for the anger of the super-powered men. The transformation of Brisbane into the Dominion is treated as a fait accomplis, and rather than explore how it happened, Giffen, Richie and Kindzierski seem to be aiming for an amoral political soap opera style. Which sounds good in theory, if only the players and the stakes were introduced more clearly.
I can't really tell whether it's the art or story that's to blame for the lack of clarity. Certainly Giffen and Kindzierski do a fantastic rendition of the ruined remnants of Brisbane or the slick commercial approach of the media in their coverage of the Dominion, and certainly the characters are visually distinctive from one another, from hair and skin color if nothing else. And yet, the jump-cutting from past to present, the rapid-fire introduction of new characters without any sort of grounding, certainly isn't helped by the artwork.
Dominion stands out as one of the most unusual and different of the new Image super-hero line, along with Clockmaker, and it certainly doesn't move in a slow and predictable fashion, meaning that it avoids two of my more common complaints about the rest of the Image super-hero line thus far. Unfortunately, Giffen and Richie swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, dumping readers into the midst of a completely new status quo without explaining anything, and the end result is more confusion than interest.
