Adventureman #1 by Fraction and Dodson — REVIEW
By Zack Quaintance — There’s a lot going on in Adventureman #1. First, the book is heavy. Literally. Written by Matt Fraction (Hawkeye, Casanova, Sex Criminals) and illustrated by Terry and Rachel Dodson (X-Men / Fantastic Four), Adventureman #1 clocks in at 56 pages (an absurd bargain given the price tag is the usual $3.99). It’s nearly triple the length of a standard issue. I suspect there is significant utility in making the first issue that length, stemming from this debut reading like two distinct comics.
As the preview text indicates (see below), Aventureman #1 is about “the greatest pulp hero of them all.” It’s specifically about how 80 years have passed since said pulp hero’s apparent demise. Essentially, the titular ADVENTUREMAN is a Doc Savage-esque pulp hero whose last story ends with him at the mercy of his arch-nemesis, about to be killed. According to the preview text, eight decades later only a single mother (who works in a lightly-trafficked rare bookshop) and her young son remember this hero at all.
So that’s the premise, and in this first issue we get 29 pages that play out Adventureman’s final adventure, before we cut to the kid and his mom reading the story together at bedtime, ending on the cliffhanger before bemoaning that that’s how it apparently concluded. This concept and structure within the first issue sort of straddles this comic in two worlds: that of the pulp hero followed by a metafictional interaction in the present with the hero’s legacy. While the preview text makes it clear that the mother and son are the only two people who remember Adventureman, I somehow missed it in my own reading, but that’s beside the point really and maybe a personal issue on my end.
I found Adventureman an intriguing read. The biggest strength of this comic is the artwork of the Dodson’s, who have a very modern style that works when reconfigured as a lens for the pulp narrative within this book. The men and women are big and idealized, the explosions are massive, and the outsized action sequence that opens the story is kinetic as all get out. They could quite clearly draw a compelling pulp comic on its own merits, without the meta second half, at least on a purely aesthetic level.
This book obviously needs that meta second half (it’s the whole concept, after all), which is also where Fraction’s scripting and plotting become more interesting, by design. This book through one issue already holds an interesting place within the larger context of Fraction’s creator-owned work, bearing very little in common with anything he’s done before. Come to think of it, that’s really a hallmark of Fraction’s career. I didn’t realize how varied it was until I started trying to figure where this book fit with the rest of it. Unlike some of his contemporaries — the Brubaker’s and Brian K. Vaughan’s of the world — it’s much harder to draw connections between Fraction-penned comics.
Between the unpredictability of Fraction’s narrative interests and the double-narrative strength of this debut, this book is intriguing. It is, however, a little difficult to praise it as a complete debut issue on its own merits. There’s not really a firm structure that seems built to sustain an interesting ongoing comic for 20-plus issues, even though I’m not sure the scope has been made clear just yet. Instead, this feels like the start of a contained story, the first chapter (or two) of a new graphic novel, and that makes it slightly more difficult to evaluate.
Overall: A big comic at a great price point, Adventureman serves up two stories within one book, two stories that seem to be interconnected in an interesting way, but time and future issues will tell on that. 8.0/10
Adventureman #1
Writer: Matt Fraction
Artist: Terry Dodson
Colorist: Rachel Dodson
Letterer: Unlisted in review press materials
Publisher: Image Comics
Price: $3.99
SERIES PREMIERE! A CATACLYSMIC ADVENTURE DECADES IN THE MAKING! In this WILDLY AFFORDABLE TRIPLE-LENGTH FIRST ISSUE, revisit how the legend of the greatest pulp hero of them all, ADVENTUREMAN, ended in a heartbreaking CLIFFHANGER with our hero facing execution at the vile hand of his ultra-nemesis BARON BIZARRE on the eve of the MACABRAPOCALYPSE...or did it?!? Eighty years after his apparent demise, single mother Claire and her Adventurefan son Tommy seem to be the only two people alive that remember the thrilling ADVENTUREMAN sagas...but from that memory burns THE SPARK OF RESURRECTION! WHERE HIS STORY ENDED...HER STORY BEGINS! This sense-obliterating, earth-shaking, imagination-quaking adventure that spans generations comes to you from MATT FRACTION (SEX CRIMINALS, Hawkeye) and TERRY & RACHEL DODSON (X-Men/Fantastic Four, RED ONE)!!!
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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.