I've gotta be honest, I generally feel like there's plenty of superhero material in the comics medium right now, and for the indy guys to put out superhero books instead of something else can often feel like also-ran material. However, there are definitely exceptions, and if someone can produce a superhero book that actually stands up to the superhero books from the big three (DC, Marvel, Image), well, I'll sit up and take notice. Hero Corps: The Rookie looks like that kind of book, an institutional superhero book that has echoes of Powers, Top 10 and Capes, mixing the superhero genre with the grind of daily police work and the resulting bureaucracy to interesting effect.
While Hero Corps has similarities to both Top 10 and Capes, in that it examines the superhero as paid employee rather than altruistic vigilante, it's different enough to find its own space in this niche. Becker's influences clearly lie more on the cop show side of things than anything else, and indeed Hero Corps reads a lot like what you might have gotten if a good cop show like NYPD Blue or Hill Street Blues had been done with superpowers. The stories are half about the crimes and the politics of the precincts and half about the relationships between the characters. This means that there's plenty of meat to the story, and in fact it occasionally feels like Becker may have overloaded the story with too much in the way of subplots, but he pulls it all together pretty effectively.
One of the cool things about Hero Corps is that it really does feel like a world where you could read more stories. It's not quite as expansive and imaginative as Moore's Top 10, which felt limitless, but Becker sets up the background and how the world deals with superpowers well enough to get a sense that you could see a number of stories in this world pretty easily. Little details like unions protesting superhuman labor or the celebrity status of the newest Hero Corps member give an indication what having superpowers in this world is like, and these elements are all dealt with in a consistent fashion. The nice thing is, though, that The Rookie is a self-contained graphic novel even while it feels like there's room for more. Most of the big relationships between the characters are resolved in this volume, even if there are plenty of ways in which Becker could explore the further lives of many of them.
The storytelling format in Hero Corps: The Rookie is also fairly sophisticated, especially for a new creator. Becker's story takes place in flashbacks, such that we meet some characters at the end of their lives only to see more of how they lived in later chapters, and while there's definitely a fairly linear structure at work, there are a number of moments that take place in the past to flesh out the present. This can be a tricky balance, but Becker pulls off the time-shifting pretty effectively, such that we see what we need to know when we need to know it. The only place where I felt that Becker really faltered was in the final combat, which just felt a bit rushed and also lacked a strongly developed nemesis, so that the final battle felt impersonal and almost too random. This fits in with the police story motif at work in Hero Corps, so it's hard to complain too much, but I was wishing for a stronger connection to the fight than I had.
Part of the blame for that lies with artist Greg Moutafis, whose silent action sequences just aren't as strong as a good superhero action sequence really needs to be. Because the backgrounds tend to disappear during the fights, the fights lose a sense of scale, and become more one-on-one affairs, and this makes them seem far too mundane for the knockdown brawls that they really need to be. In every other respect, Moutafis does a solid job here, with an art style reminiscent of a less polished Steve Rolston and some really nice storytelling abilities. Moutafis doesn't really do flashy in terms of panel design, but generally provides plenty of background detail and character work, resulting in clean and very readable book.
This is an advance review. The book is due for release later in October.
