The Saviors #1

by James Robinson & J.Bone

The Saviors marks James Robinson’s return to a creator owned series since his departure from DC Comics, and with him he has brought artist J. Bone. The Saviors follows a small town slacker named Tomas who works at a gas station, smokes weed all day and has no ambition to leave his desert hometown. Of course that all changes one day when Tomas gets a glimpse of something he wasn’t supposed to see.

The story of The Saviors itself is pretty familiar with Tomas himself being a pretty one-dimensional character so far. Fortunately, Robinson, whose strong ability is to make relatable characters, is still able to make the reader comfortably follow Tomas and relate to his attractive personality. This issue starts off with Tomas getting high and introducing himself and a quick summary of his life story to a small roaming lizard who proceeds to quickly run away from Tomas. Even though Tomas by all means is a loser, he has a likable quality that makes you as a reader interested in him.

J. Bone has made his rounds in the comics industry and has a unique style that most people would compare to Darwyn Cooke or Bruce Timm. Now usually J. Bone’s stuff pops off the page and is usually in your face, but for The Saviors decided to go with the simple black and white approach. When an artist uses a more simplistic approach to a black and white book it can sometimes come off as flat, especially when there isn’t a lot of detail or shading. Now this could very well have just been a personal problem since the last four graphic novels I’ve read were black and white but were still very detailed and had a grandiose feeling. This isn’t to say the art is bad; J. Bone’s style is normally a breath of fresh air but this art just felt dull.

The first issue of The Saviors started off decently. The story may have a common theme but there is still enough there to keep you intrigued to read on. Even the though the art wasn’t spectacular it still flowed well and kept the story moving and interesting. The problem with The Saviors is that these two creators are both great but their styles just don’t mesh well on the page for this particular comic. Again, this could very well be a personal taste problem; nothing in this issue was terrible but nothing really jumped out at me either.