Sinergy #1

by Michael Avon Oeming & Taki Soma

When you see a new series by Michael Avon Oeming on the stands, you know you’re in for some offbeat concepts. Sinergy is his latest series with co-creator Taki Soma. After losing her virginity, Jess has earned the ability to see monsters. Now her father decides to train her to take up the family tradition of hunting down these monsters.

Sinergy follows in Oeming’s tradition of twisting a typical comic premise and injecting it with his distinctive style of grittiness. Jess and her father have a tense relationship that one would expect from any teenager and her father. Then you add the whole monsters feeding off of people’s sin thing and you have a lot to deal with. Even though there were some clunky areas in the story, Sinergy mostly read smoothly. Readers are thrown into this world without too much hand-holding, so be ready to hit the ground running when you pick this up.

Artistically, Sinergy undeniably looks like a Michael Avon Oeming book. He still uses his mostly black pages and his deep shading that give all of his stories their signature dark tones. Colors were handled by co-creator and co-writer Taki Soma, which actually stood out this issue. There are some interesting choices with the coloring in spots of this issue, particularly in one scene where the family is around the dinner table and everyone looks a sickly tone of green. However, Soma’s back-up story at the end looked amazing. Her style of art still honored Oeming’s, but absolutely had its own look. The way she handled the conversation between two human-disguised monsters, while using smaller panels to reveal their true selves, was brilliant. Hopefully Soma will have more back-ups in future Sinergy issues.

Aside from a few bumps, Sinergy‘s first issue had a lot of fun ideas. This might not be a series for just anyone, especially if you’re new to Oeming’s work. Sometimes his mature stories paired with his simplistic and innocent looking art can be off-putting to certain readers.  However, I suggest people check out Sinergy just to see Taki Soma’s backup art.