Publisher: Jet City Comics
Creative Team: Joshua Hale Fialkov and Bernard Chang
“Oh SWEET! KARATE ROBOT BEAR ”
If you’re wondering why the medium of comics isn’t taken seriously by some people, it’s because comics like King still exist. After completing the first issue, I felt as if I read something written by a teenager that’s just hit puberty and discovered sex and violence. Actually this feels like a comic written by Quagmire from Family Guy after that episode where he discovers the internet.
This was terrible mainly because the story doesn’t seem to have any coherence. I imagine when brainstorming ideas for this story there was a mind map titled: Things That Are Awesome. Once finished literally every single one of those ideas was used in the space of 20 pages.
Let me list some of the things I came across whilst reading the first issue of King: The mention of Interspecies porn, a karate robot bear that shoots lasers out of its nipples, a joke about getting your private parts cut off (but not in the fun way – wait what?) and then a joke about interspecies porn involving murder – again with the added commentary of not in the fun way.
This issue can be summarized as an apocalyptic setting accompanied with a couple of terrible jokes and literally no appealing threads to the story it tries to tell. Finding a life seed that could restore the world to its former glory is the driving force behind the story but even that reveal turns out to be disappointing.
King himself is your typical dudebro hero with the mandatory wisecracking tough guy personality. The only saving grace is Bernard Chang’s art which is very, very pretty. Does this series have potential? Definitely but this first issue does not make me confident at all that this potential will actually be fulfilled.
I received a copy from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. I would like to thank both them and the publisher.
Grade: E
Grading System: A (Essential Purchase), B (Recommended Purchase), C (Worth A Read), D (Poor), E (Avoid)
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