CREDIT: Image Comics
Rating: 5/5 – Imagination in Overdrive!
by ComicSpectrum EiC Bob Bretall.
Joe Keatinge and Leila Del Duca have created something special here. We’re introduced in 21 pages to a world of high adventure with moon exploration, lost gods returned to Earth, strange races of ALL sorts intermingled with humans, mechanical men, and ghost ninjas. And that’s only the start. It’s like an imagination bomb went off and Keatinge and Del Duca took the full brunt of the blast!
Our story is summed up very succinctly as:
Kate Kristopher was raised to be the world’s greatest explorer and she was until she didn’t want to be anymore. Shutter is what happens next.
She’s a photographer now (thus the title ‘Shutter’), but the crazy life of an adventurer/explorer isn’t that easy to just walk away from, as we begin to learn in this issue. I wish I could get some hi-res scans of Del Duca’s art just so I could drink in all the detail in the backgrounds of her panels, there is so much more to be discovered about this world. Make sure you look around at the scene outside Kate’s window, as well as the other passengers on the train, and all the details of Kate’s Father’s study. Lest I forget, kudos to color artist Owen Gieni. The use of the Ben-Day dots coloring technique for the flashback of Kate & her Father when she was six was very nicely done. It gave the sequence an automatic ‘old-timey’ feel.
Adding value to this comic is the back-matter. A fun 4-page comic about giant monster ‘MUNGORE’ by Ryan Alexander-Tanner, a cool pin-up by Anthony Gregori (I’d love to see the story behind this pin-up, which brings me to the notion that seeing adventures from Kate’s past would be very cool to see as backups) and capping it all off with a single page intro to ‘Tiger Lawyer’ by Ryan Ferrier and Felipe Torrent that I’m now going to need to check out because this page was super fun. What I’m getting at is that this comic is packed with content and is well worth checking out. Shutter is in prime position to jump to the top of my “favorite comics” list if Keatinge and Del Duca keep it up at this pace for the next few issues. By the way, issue #2? It can’t come soon enough!
Reviewed by: Bob Bretall
(bob@comicspectrum.com)
https://comicspectrum.com/ Covering the full spectrum of comics culture
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