Zero #3

by Ales Kot, Mateus Santolouco & Jordie Bellaire

Issue three of ZERO takes place in 2019 and seems to be Edward Zero’s roughest mission yet.  Zero, along with his friend and fellow spy Mina, have secretly infiltrated a fancy crowd funding party for terrorists. Being surrounded by so many high profile and dangerous terrorists makes this more intense than the average recon mission.

Using a different artist every issue can make for a difficult read, but since each issue as a different vignette of Edward Zero’s life it actually completes this series. Each issue is really it’s own self contained story with Edward Zero’s life being the constant that ties it all together. In fact, not only is this a great idea to showcase great artists but you could really turn this into an ongoing series since one could assume Zero went on hundreds of different missions. This mission, however, didn’t go quite the way he wanted at all, now how will this effect Zero’s future missions.

As mentioned before, each issue of ZERO is done by a different artist and so far each artist has been paired quite well with the story they’re on. Having not really been familiar with Santolouco’s art previously, this issue was personally my favorite. Having Zero in a tuxedo at a villains’ ball recon mission gives a classic secret agent feel. There is even a bit of a sci-fi twist when Zero stumbles on a roughly made teleporter, which looks both creepy and gorgeous at the same time.

This issue had a few other twists and reveals that I wouldn’t want to spoil for anyone but this was by far the most exciting and perplexing issue of ZERO yet. This series so far has been really fun to follow, having read Kot’s previous creator-owned work, you know things are never as simple as they may appear. While it’s been fun to watch all these small shots of Edward Zero’s life, it’ll be interesting to see how this series may end or at least how it will circle around and address the kid with a gun pointed to the back of an elderly Zero’s head from the first page of the very first issue that sparked these flashbacks to begin with.