The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage #2

By Jen Van Meter, Roberto De La Torre and David Baron

There’s something eerie about this new Death-Defying Doctor Mirage series from Valiant. The dead world, spirits, demons, weird alien looking dudes, ectoplasm goo and so much more, but that might not even be what really makes it creepy.

Roberto De La Torre and David Baron, pencils/ink and colors respectively, really amp up the creep-factor with heavy blacks and muted colors. This is most certainly a book that De La Torre was meant to draw and he does a great job of making it stand out from the rest of the Valiant pack with his own signature look and feel. David Baron also fits this book perfectly; his choices of colors really work with the book while also feeling different and unusual. It’s like he pulled out every color of the rainbow as the book progressed, and it just elevated the art to another level.

But, of course, there’s still a large creepy factor from writer Jen Van Meter who sets it all up. Admittedly, there might be a second read of the first issue in the immediate future because it feels like issue two really jumped forward and it was a little confusing at first, but that could be attributed to the fact that the advance release of issue one was long before the physical release, so it could be a bit fuzzy. Regardless of any minimal confusion the book still reads well and in a similar fashion to the art guys, Van Meter really sets this book apart from the rest of the Valiant Universe. And to top it all off, by the end of the book she has you scrambling for the next issue with one, simple speech bubble.

The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage is not your average Valiant book, and while it seems to be a bit on the outside looking in at books like X-O Manowar and Bloodshot simply because it is so different, it’s still something that demands your attention. DDDM will undoubtedly tie into the rest of the Valiant Universe after the first arc, as was the trend with all the initial launches, which will certainly help with exposure and getting this character more time with readers who might have skipped over the launch. As it stands now, not enough people seem to be checking this book out and that’s a damn shame because there’s definitely something special happening in this corner of the Valiant Universe.