It's always tricky following up your first big hit. The Red Star came out of nowhere and surprised everyone, a beautiful combination of computer and traditional in artwork, science-fiction and political parable in story, and though it quickly became one of those books on a "once in a blue moon" schedule, it caught a lot of attention. Enough that the creators left two publishers and created their own publishing company, Archangel Studios, and now, several years after the debut of The Red Star, they introduce their second title, Assassin. Unfortunately, while The Red Star came out to no expectations and surprised me with how good it was, Assassin had a raised bar of expectations and it just didn't clear it.
The dark future is a setting that, despite its heavy use in so many mediums, I have a certain fondness for. In addition, there's a certain timeliness to the idea of America as a place where democracy has been quietly replaced with a more totalitarian regime with a religious bent. So I'm not sure how Kayl and Gossett managed to make their setting quite so boring. Perhaps it's the two-dimensional nature of their characters, a saintly woman who can do no wrong and a sexist, violent bastard in power, or perhaps it's that we haven't been made to feel the consequences of the protagonist's actions yet, never seeing this squalor and injustice but instead only being told about it. Whatever the case, the characters don't really come alive any more than the setting, and that's a big problem.
Another problem, and I suspect this is a big part of it for me, is that Kayl and Gossett are hitting a lot of the same territory that conspiracy- and political-minded comic writers like Warren Ellis or Mark Millar have tackled, and they don't have the same flair for dialogue or over-the-top sensibilities as these writers, nor do they have the ability to play it more subtly, which would be the obvious way to distinguish Assassin from your Reloads, your Authorities and your Global Frequencies. Instead, we get a corrupt Pope, a President with a taste for underage Thai slaves, a third world dictator who runs the American capitalist manufacturing machine and a small-minded, vicious director of the CIA. All of them described with one or two lines and never really fleshed out beyond their cliched existence, just like the strikingly dull perfect saint who the assassin murders in the latter half of the book.
Then there's the strange decision to do the book in black and white. While I can understand the budgetary constraints on a self-publisher, this is a creative team that has made their reputation in large part thanks to their gorgeous coloring work on The Red Star, and certainly there are no arthouse sensibilities that would require Assassin to be a black and white book. Jet Henderson's art is solid, if occasionally sparse on the backgrounds, but I can't help thinking how much better it would have looked with color behind it.
The premise of Assassin, a hired killer who has found his conscience, is hardly original but certainly has plenty of room for exploration. Especially in the futuristic, politically-dark setting that Kayl and Gossett have developed, which seems as rich a target for social allegory as the exploration of communist Russia in The Red Star. Unfortunately, in the first issue, what we're given is nothing more than cliche and flat, lifeless characters, and it's certainly not the strong start that I've come to expect from this company's other big endeavor.
