Touch has a fascinating concept at the center of it, and a style that explores a side of superheroics that I've always been kind of interested in, the public relations/money side of things. I can easily see this becoming a strong part of the Focus line over time. Unfortunately, this first issue is a little unclear in general, and in trying to save the big reveal of the concept for the last page, Moore kills a lot of my interest in the first story. There's plenty of talent at work here, and I like some things about the writing and the art, but I have problems with some of the writing and the art as well, and I hope that the flaws will decrease as time goes on, and the strengths will remain.
The strength of the story in Touch #1 is with Rory Goodman, a man whose body is invulnerable but whose soul has been shattered by a tragic accident. It's a loose parallel, but I was very much reminded of M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable in reading Rory's story, as here is a guy who has amazing powers but who is shackled by the most mundane of problems, failures in his personal life with his wife. It's a terrific dichotomy, and though Rory came off as a little too self-destructive and self-pitying to be as sympathetic as I think Moore intended, it was fascinating to watch the tail end of a long-running cycle of self-destruction.
The weakness of the story, unfortunately, is that Rory seems unlikely to continue on as a main character. Instead, Cooper Santiago seems the likely lead, and though he is interesting as well, the most interesting aspect of his character doesn't reveal itself until the very end, when the reader has already made other assumptions about his character and his role. It's an effective shocker, but I'm not sure it's worth the sudden realization that everything read in this issue doesn't really matter all that much, because Cooper's media manipulation and business is about something very different than it's been presented as. Also, the concept strikes me as similar to the one being explored in DC's H-E-R-O, and Moore will have to work hard not to cover the same ground that Will Pfeifer is covering in that book.
The strength of the artwork is that Wesley Craig (a name new to me) and Prentis Rollins (an inker I've always liked) tackle what seems to be the Focus "house style," a streamlined, simple look, very well. Their characters look very sharp, there's a lot of beautiful detail and realism on everything from a jungle cat to a packed fight arena to a construction site, and the shadows are very nice, giving the book a dark undercurrent that fits the tone of the writing.
The weakness of the artwork is that too many of Craig's characters, especially his women, look the same, leading me to some minor confusion, and his design for Rory Goodman isn't as distinctive as it should have been either. Rory shifts from handsome poster boy to average working stiff throughout the issue, and while both are aspects of his character, the change is distracting, as the character often doesn't really look the same from scene to scene. In addition, while Brian Haberlin's unusual color scheme looks great on Hard Time and Kinetic, the work by Haberlin's studio Avalon doesn't seem as strong here, a little darker and more saturated and oftentimes muddying the artwork instead of highlighting it.
