I love a good caper, and I love a good space-faring story, and A Different Pace has elements of both. Hedgecock has crafted a cast of unusual space pirates who go from planet to planet stealing things and doing good deeds, and A Different Pace features four tales of these pirates and their adventures. While the general ideas are good and the potential is there, however, I did have a few quibbles with A Different Pace, including some clutter in the artwork that made elements of the story hard to follow and characters that are roughly defined but never quite fleshed out, which is hard to swallow with the page count of a graphic novel.
Hedgecock is aiming for a certain kind of book with A Different Pace, providing not one big story but four separate stories with the same characters. It's a curious decision to put four standalone tales into an original graphic novel, one that doesn't take advantage of his chosen format and winds up with somewhat shallow characters and a shallow world setting as a result. Hedgecock steers clear of deep exploration of these characters, instead settling for little tidbits of information like Smoking Frog's mysterious brother in the first story, the revelation of Buford's age in the fourth tale or the somewhat cliched bickering relationship between Michael and Buford throughout. The characters are clear enough, but they don't really have enough depth to be engaging. The same is true for Hedgecock's science-fiction world, which is only sketchily defined and thus falls flat as a setting that fires the imagination.
Instead of focusing on these elements, Hedgecock focuses on four individual plots, and that is where the strength of A Different Pace can be found. The second story, of an old friend become an enemy and an underwater adventure that made him that way, is a solid little action tale, and the fourth story is a fun take on that plot chestnut, the practical joke among friends. The third story, "Rule of the Egg," is the strongest one of the bunch, taking a nifty science-fiction type of idea about how a ruling system is chosen on an alien world and crafting around it a tale of government corruption and Robin Hood style antics on behalf of the lead characters. Their motivations seem kind of shaky, given that they were going to rip off the egg and then suddenly become concerned about the ramifications surrounding its forgery, but the pirates with a conscience is enough of a genre staple that I can accept it.
The back cover copy promises "beautifully illustrated, self-contained stories" and the book doesn't wholly deliver on either one. True, Hedgecock's tales are mostly standalone, but they all have certain elements that hint at a larger tale mostly untouched. The first story is especially bad about this, introducing the mysteries of Smoking Frog's abilities and history and Lily's mysterious decision to take a descrambler in lieu of payment, but all of the stories contain elements that seem to wish for a larger story, even though Hedgecock doesn't really provide much of one at this point.
As for beautifully illustrated, while Liew's work has a ton of potential, it also has some notable flaws at this early stage, most especially his tendency to offer up cluttered panels and a lot more black ink than is necessary. When his characters look good, they look really good, reminiscent of the work of Terry Dodson, and certainly he doesn't skimp when it comes to the background detail, but there's a lack of consistency that makes some of the characters (notably Smoking Frog and Michael) hard to pick out easily, and his action storytelling is often kind of cluttered. The storytelling in general is solid enough, and even the cluttered sequences are decipherable, but Liew is clearly at the beginning of his career and still has some growth ahead of him.
A Different Pace is an intriguing introduction to these characters, and it certainly has potential, but it's not the strongest possible introduction to a new concept and characters that I've ever seen. 5/10
