Armor Hunters: Harbinger #1

By Joshua Dysart, Robert Gill and Romulo Fajardo

Not being as familiar with Harbinger proper, going into this Armor Hunters tie-in was a little nerve racking. Who are these characters? Will three issues be enough to pull people into their stories and maybe even have people continue to follow them afterwards? Well, for one, it doesn’t focus on the characters you’d expect – at least, not yet. Instead of focusing on The Renegades, as the title might suggest, we get a look at the younger squad of talented individuals known as Generation Zero.

For writer Joshua Dysart’s part, he does a surprisingly decent job of introducing these characters with quick little name tags, for lack of a better term, that describes their powers and their code names. There are a lot of characters to go over, so this is probably the best way Dysart could have gone in order to bring people hooked on Armor Hunters up to speed with all the craziness going on in Harbinger. Not being particularly familiar with Generation Zero as a whole, it’s hard to have much of an opinion on the characterization. It was, however, an interesting thought to have their leader, Cronus, talk about how he really doesn’t care about humanity or helping it in the face of the devastation that has befallen Mexico City. It’s refreshing to see one would-be hero with other publishers, be rather selfish and cold, especially standing on a hill overlooking the crater that was once Mexico City. Cold as ice, man.

On the art side, Robert Gill certainly has some impresses pages here. Particularly the scene with Cloud trying to connect with the Mexican survivors to let them know everything will be okay, then getting the insane image of the explosion going off while simultaneously feeling what they must have felt as it happened. Great, great page with lots of little details to pour over. Using the same page as the example here, colorist Romulo Fajardo beautifully renders what could be a very overwhelming page using a fantastic contrast between Cloud and the scenes she’s witnessing. The blue pops fantastically, and if you look close you can even see what appear to be ghosts among the blues. Just a great, great page and a great example of the kind of work you’ll find in this tie-in.

For what it’s worth this tie-in, that’s outside of the regular X-O Manowar area (IE: Unity and X-O Manowar itself), is pretty good. There’s not a ton of things going on, but being at ground zero has a lot of potential in the upcoming two issues. It might not be as good as the Bloodshot focused tie-in, but it’s certainly worth a read. Valiant continues its streak of wins during this event, and the next installments can’t get here soon enough.