by Brandon Graham (Author, Illustrator), Emma Ríos (Author, Illustrator), Ludroe (Author, Illustrator), Kelly DeConnick (Author), Marian Churchland (Author)

PRETTY DEADLY artist EMMA RIOS and KING CITY, PROPHET, and MULTIPLE WARHEADS writer/artist BRANDON GRAHAM bring you a new ONGOING COMICS MAGAZINE. Each issue holds three issue-length chapters of new work from various creators around the globe. Printed oversized with no ads!

FEATURES A TEXT PIECE BY KELLY SUE DECONNICK writer of BITCH PLANET and PRETTY DEADLY.

“Island” #1 is a creator-owned anthology of original comics, curated by Brandon Graham and Emma Ríos. The debut issue has three major stories, a personal essay and some extras.

After a lush painted title page by Marian Churchland, “Island” #1 launches with “I.D.” by Emma Ríos. Three characters — all very different in appearance, background, personality and motivation — are brought together. While the body modification twist is new, the shape of the story is old. Misfits are drawn together by a shared crisis, and the resulting themes of disenfranchisement and alienation go hand in hand with the plot.

“I.D.” has spectacular, swiftly flowing artwork, but Ríos’ dialogue is stilted and unnatural. Exposition is smooth, however, beginning in medias res. The doctor’s office scenes that follow the cafe opener make the facts clear very quickly without feeling like information dumps. Ríos’ facial expressions and body language are excellent for Noa, who is nervous and agitated, but they aren’t nearly as strong for Charlotte, who looks like she’s swooning when she’s merely rolling her eyes. The red ink adds mood, but it’s too bright and diminishes contrast. The resulting aesthetic losses are acute for the detailed cityscapes. While the story has some pull to it, Ríos’ breathlessly dramatic linework is the real draw.

“Railbirds,” written by Kelly Sue DeConnick and illustrated by Emma Ríos, is not a comic but tribute to and eulogy for her friend Maggie Estep. It’s about their friendship, what kind of person Maggie was and what kind of person DeConnick was, described with powerfully emotional recollections and an extended analogy on horseracing. Emma Ríos’ illustrations always show the two women in red and blue, reinforcing the bond at the center of the piece. DeConnick begins with a splendid hook of an opening sentence, but she stumbles immediately afterwards. The first two paragraphs are defensive, self-conscious and veer into self-indulgent metanarrative. Any cleverness is cancelled out by how these paragraphs further delay real substance. The third paragraph, ignoring the heavy-handed “Maggie taught me” refrains, is the true beginning. From there, the prose takes off smoothly. DeConnick’s meditations on sobriety, rule-breaking, self-consciousness, addiction, pleasure and laughter are punctuated with vivid figures of speech and references from Aerosmith to Steinbeck. While “Railbirds” is a strange fit for a comic anthology — especially since Estep wasn’t a comics creator herself — it’s hard to argue against the inclusion of an eloquent, heartfelt essay.

In “Multiple Warheads 2: Ghosttown,” Brandon Graham’s gorgeous landscapes pair well with his wildly inventive character design. His color work is magnificent, especially in his pairing of indigo, mauve and Cheetos-orange on the second page. His wordplay and visual experimentation are charming. Transitions are anchored by homonyms and other flights of fancy. The only major complaint is the usual one of accessibility. Except for the title itself, there is little indication to a new reader that this piece is the latest of several “Multiple Warheads” installments. Graham’s work is predictably, deliberately dense and difficult to follow, and this rigorous opacity can feel mercilessly unfriendly to newbies. His use of Leetspeak, which adds richness but yet another barrier to entry, is typical of his narrative approach. The reader must slow down to understand any of it but, once resigned to this change of pace, Graham’s work is a pleasure to dissect.

“Dagger Proof Mummy” by Ludroe and Marthe Bazile is a visually smooth ride. The fighting in the first scene is kinetic and exciting, especially in the panels in which the clothing stripes and motion lines blur into one and the flashbacks intersect naturally. Unfortunately, the lettering is noticeably stiff and computer-like, a bad fit for the quick-moving, liquid flow of the story. The monotone coloring doesn’t add visual depth but it makes scene changes sharper and adds some mood.

Also, Ludroe’s prose is clunky and cliched. The dialogue and textboxes try too hard with rhyming and metaphors. Lines like “this city needs you” sound too much like a parody of Batman to have serious emotional resonance. The big plot twist is heavily foreshadowed and predictable, but the final impression of “Dagger Proof Mummy” is that the Ludroe’s linework is able to convey the speed and highs of his true subject: skateboarding.

Last, Graham closes with “Polaris 1,” in which he speaks directly to the reader about his creative process. It’s wonderfully casual and candid, and the epigraph — a quote from Fellini — couldn’t be more apt.

I’m a fan of the big page count that allows for longer chunks of interrupted story. Each piece in “Island” #1 has a satisfying length and impact.

Image Comics takes a bold, exciting risk with the new magazine Island

Island #1. Featuring works by Brandon Graham (King City, Prophet), Emma Ríos (Pretty Deadly, Osborn), Ludroe (King City, Prophet), Kelly Sue DeConnick (Pretty Deadly, Bitch Planet), and Marian Churchland (Beast, 8house: Arclight), this stunning new comics magazine marks a major departure for Image Comics that opens up a wealth of creative possibilities.

Comic magazines are making a comeback. Earlier this month, Entertainment Weekly announced that acclaimed writer Grant Morrison will be joining Heavy Metal magazine as editor-in-chief in 2016, a move that suddenly has everyone talking about Heavy Metal as a major comic-book force again, and this week, Image Comics debuts Island, a new ongoing comics magazine curated by Brandon Graham and Emma Ríos featuring talent from across the globe. There’s renewed interest in the magazine format, likely because the cost-to-page-count ratio is so uneven with regular comic-book single issues, but a title like Island still has a tough uphill climb ahead of it. Anthology comics don’t do especially well, and then there’s the questions surrounding any new comics project: Will it find an audience? Will comic shops order enough copies? Will customers put in pre-orders for future issues? And most importantly: Is it any good?

The answer to that last question is an emphatic yes, and Graham, Ríos, and company make a big impression with this first issue. But before getting into the quality of the stories, let’s look at how Island’s cost-to-page-count ratio compares to most single issues. With the industry standard currently at $3.99 for approximately 20 pages of content—DC and Image have more books in the $2.99-$3.50 price range, but are also inching toward $3.99—Island offers more than five times the amount of content for only double the price. That’s one of the best values in comics, and readers are getting a lot when they pick up Island #1: Ríos has a 24-page story, “ID,” about three people volunteering for a body transplant procedure; Graham offers a 30-page continuation of his Multiple Warheads miniseries as well as shorter autobiographical strips; and Ludroe has the longest story with the 44-page “Dagger Proof Mummy,” introducing a crime-fighting mummy and a young skateboarder looking for her missing friend.

In addition to the comics, there’s also a touching five-page memoir by Ríos’ Pretty Deadly collaborator Kelly Sue DeConnick (with illustrations by Ríos) about her friendship with the late writer and poet Maggie Estep, and Marian Churchland provides two paintings that serve as the magazine’s opening splash pages. Having Churchland’s artwork at the start of the issue immediately establishes that Island will be a multimedia magazine, and there’s a sense of motion in Churchland’s first painting that creates the impression of a wave carrying the reader to a magical place where comic creators can experiment and evolve. That island is given a slightly ominous quality by Churchland’s dark, moody painting for the title page, but that atmosphere quickly evaporates with the next page, a goofy strip showing Graham’s cartoon persona receiving ultimate freedom from his God-like publisher.

Graham is responsible for the creation of this magazine, and his playful perspective keeps Island from taking itself too seriously. Opening with two abstract paintings is pretty high-brow, but Graham quickly injects some silliness into the magazine to show that there’s going to be a considerable range of tones and artistic styles in the pages ahead. Ríos and DeConnick’s back-to-back pieces are the most serious the issue gets, with Ríos exploring major questions about identity in “ID” while DeConnick’s “Railbirds” pays tribute to the memory of a friend who was hugely influential in her life. Things lighten up in “Ghost Town,” Graham’s new Multiple Warheads story, and then Ludroe’s “Dagger Proof Mummy” closes it all out with an exhilarating mix of skateboarding and hand-to-hand combat in a gritty urban landscape.

The cover of Island #1 emphasizes place over characters or plot, and all of the stories in this issue give ample attention to the environment and making the setting clear for the reader. In DeConnick’s memoir, that setting is the racetrack that she and Estep used to frequent, and the excitement of DeConnick’s experience watching the horse races shines through in her prose. In Ríos’ story, the relaxed atmosphere of the coffee shop is a stark contrast to the chaos raging on the street outside, and she builds tension by jumping between the two locations and showing how the situation on the street escalates while Mike, Noa, and Charlotte talk over coffee. The urban environment of “ID” is dramatically different from the city in “Dagger Proof Mummy,” which is a much more barren location that accentuates the loneliness of young skateboarder Reno. A graffiti influence can be seen in Ludroe’s thick linework and dynamic composition, making his environment the middle ground between the realistic rendering of Ríos’ setting and the spectacularly imaginative imagery of Graham’s.

Graham’s two-page “Polaris” strip at the end of the issue directly addresses the ways he approaches settings in his work, and you can see all of those ideas at work in “Ghost Town.” A two-page splash of Nikoli and Sexica at the whale restaurant All’s Whale That Ends Whale highlights the various spaces of the establishment by making walls transparent and incorporating smaller panels that reveal different angles of the locations shown in the larger image. In a later two-page spread, Graham bridges two scenes by placing a map along the top half of the page, showing three different perspectives of two different environments in one remarkably clever layout.

While Graham is operating firmly in his wheelhouse, Ríos and Ludroe are embarking into new creative territory with their comics. “ID” is the first significant work written by Ríos, and it’s fascinating to see she can do when she has complete control over the narrative. Island is her chance to explore a new area of her craft, and her story for “ID” shows a lot of promise with smooth dialogue, well-developed characters, and a captivating hook. There are a few rough spots—a comment about “growing a pair” said to the transgender Noa while he reluctantly uses the women’s washroom is a forced attempt at comedy that doesn’t quite land—but overall Ríos shows considerable writing talent to go along with her huge skill as an artist.

“Dagger Proof Mummy” is Ludroe’s first extended comic-book work in any capacity, and with its roots in skateboarding culture and 8-bit video games, it feels like a throwback to the alternative comics of the early ’90s. Ludroe’s style is rougher than Ríos’ and Graham’s, but that harder edge works for his story about young people trying to survive in a dangerous world. Not all of the roughness works in Ludroe’s favor—the blunt computer coloring used for most of the text has much less personality than the small bits of lettering he does by hand—but there’s a freshness and vitality in Ludroe’s work that makes his debut a lot of fun to read.

The storytelling styles are all over the place in Island #1, but that’s a big part of the appeal. Each individual work represents the unique perspective of its creator, and they all come together under one cover to make this first issue a celebration of the different ways art can be used for personal expression. It’s a risky endeavor for Image Comics, but hopefully the passion of these creators will resonate with readers and keep them coming back for more, because there’s a wide world of writers, artists, and cartoonists that would benefit from the Island spotlight.

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