Writer: Mark Powers
Artist: Chris Lie
Publisher: Devil’s Due Press

So, you’re hanging out, minding your own business, doing your thing, and then BAM! You disappear off the face of the earth, drafted by an alien race into a forthcoming war. Placed in a platoon with other draftee’s like the convenience store worker, and the President of the United States. They train you for battle while society on Earth begins to crumble.

Sounds pretty cool, huh? Well, all that and more is contained in the excellent Drafted series by Devil’s Due Press.

Both Ain’t It Cool News and Entertainment Weekly have touted Drafted as the next big comic worth reading outside of the Big Two. Devil’s Due is a company that has relied heavily on it’s licensed comics to this point, but Drafted could change all that. Written by Mark Powers, Drafted is a book the survives on it’s story. Chris Lie’s pencils are well done, but don’t always mesh with the writing. In fact, I think that this misfiring is what holds this book back from a larger audience. The art simply doesn’t jump off the page and pull me in the way the storyline does.

What intrigued me about Drafted (now at Issue #6) and caused me to pick it up off the shelves, was the fact that it is a fresh take on the Alien Invasion story. In fact, it isn’t until issue #3 that we ever see our abductors, and we have yet to come across this supposed enemy that the humans are being trained to fight. This builds a real tension in the book, and makes you feel like you are right there with the people of Earth as their friends and family disappear and society begins to fall apart around them.

I have been hooked on Drafted from the start, and I imagine that it is going to make an excellent graphic novel when Devil’s Due gets around to collecting it. The only problem that I have with this book is that it seems to come out whenever it feels like it. I don’t know if it’s a production issue, or simply missed deadlines, but it seems like a very long time between issues. This makes it hard to follow some of the story without going back and re-reading the previous issues.

Fortunately, issues of Drafted are so good, I was doing that any way.

-JM

Related posts

• Indie Book of The Week - Serenity: Better Days (0)
• Future-Casting: Secret Invasion #1 (0)

Tags: Chris Lie, Drafted, indie, Invasion, Mark Powers

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 12:06 am and is filed under Indie Book of The Week, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.