When I saw the brief preview of Dog Soldiers in the previous issue of Image Introduces, I was pretty intrigued. Solid artwork and a promising military/action writing style, not to mention an interesting idea about bio-engineering, seemed to offer up an unusual concept. Unfortunately, Hunter has bitten off more than he can chew in an attempt to tell three stories in the same space that sort of kind of tie in, and I found myself unable to make heads or tails of the story for much of the reading. The artwork is still very good, and I hope to see future work from Pachoumis and Rizzo, but I'm not really hoping to see any more of Dog Soldiers based on this preview.
The first five pages of this book are the same as that of the last few pages of Image Introduces... Cryptopia, and I remember thinking that those pages held out a lot of promise. Interestingly enough, it is on page six where the quality of the writing takes a steep nose dive and never really recovers. Hunter tries to show a rescue operation in Somalia, a modern day training exercise for the Dog Soldiers and a presumably post-training funding hearing for the creator of the Dog Soldiers, but it's never really clear what the timeline for these stories are. It's possible we're meant to infer that one of the soldiers in the flashback is part of the genetic code for the Dog Soldiers, but it's never made clear, and the similarities of their rescue missions makes for mostly confusion.
There are also more than a few logical questions raised, including why on Earth the government would risk using live ammo in training exercises to kill off their expensively bred soldiers, why a 11% canine would look pretty much like your average dog, where the hell an invisibility power came from and how exactly genetically-engineered hybrids are going to be cheaper than training average soldiers... but these aren't really addressed. Instead, what we get is a fairly cliched tale of bigotry (the entire reason for the inane live ammo is to show off the soldiers being bigots) and rebellion, taking possibly the least interesting road that this concept could have taken. And I'm willing to forgive cliches if the storytelling is more clear, but I wasn't entirely certain what the flashback to Somalia had to do with the story, when the Dog Soldiers went from rebelling against the death of one of their own to rescuing a helicopter pilot or when the hearing is taking place. For that matter, I'm not even sure who all the characters are, because while one of the characters gets a caption to explain his name and position, the rest are given no such thing, despite it being a pretty good idea in a story this crowded.
Understand, I was really disappointed in the writing on this book. In fact, the writing is of a level that would normally earn the entire book a much lower grade from me. However, there are two saving graces. One is the artwork, which is for the most part really impressive. Pachoumis and Rizzo serve up a shadowy and realistic style that reminds me in places of Travis Charest or Eduardo Risso. The only failing I found was the overly cartoony appearance of "Cracker," who looks like he belongs in Peanuts more than a gritty war book and is supremely out of place amongst the rest of Pachoumis's impressive work.
The other saving grace is the backup which was to be the next Image Introduces feature, Rex Mundi. It's a great teaser, introducing the concept of an alternate 1930s Paris where the Church still holds a lot of power and magic is very much a reality. The artwork by Eric J is beautiful and detailed in its depiction of Paris, although I did think that Cox's colors were a little too dark in places. At any rate, Rex Mundi will not be debuting in the pages of Image Introduces... anymore, getting its own #0 instead as Image Introduces... goes the way of the dodo. Anthologies are a hard sell in the market anyway, and when the material is sometimes great but usually merely good or (in the case of Dog Soldiers) mostly mediocre, they're an impossible sell.
