"Hills Made of Skulls are Great Vantage Points", in Charl13 #1, by Fines Massey and Chris Burgess (writers), Kristofor Harris (artist), Micah Myers (letterer), Jul Mae Kristoffer (flats)
I bought the first two issue of Charl13 at a comic convention in Springfield in fall 2018. The title character was one of a series of warbots humanity built to even their chances against an invading alien army that look basically like bipedal cattle. They were able to reach an uneasy truce, and now Charl13 patrols a kind of border zone, trying to help any humans he finds make it to their side of the zone.
Char13 is on his own, keeping his battery charged off whatever random power sources he can find. He hasn't seen any of the repair stations that are supposed to be available in a long time, or any other functioning versions of his type. It's kind of interesting, because it raises the question of what may have happened outside the wasteland. Did more aliens show up and finish off most of humanity? Did the government decide it wasn't worth continuing to fund the program? Just decided to cut their losses, too bad for anyone left on the wrong side?
By the end of the second issue, Charl13 had been badly damaged saving a group of refugees, but one of them is one of those mechanical engineering prodigy kids, so she was probably going to fix him up and they'd travel together.
I like Charl13's design, the cape breaks up the blue and greys. The aliens are giant bulls, so you basically know what you're getting there. Harris is pretty good at fight scenes and motion. The next page after this one, Charl13 slides down the hill, shows a little flair as he does, it's pretty nice. The backgrounds and settings aren't great, a lot of wreckage that kind of blurs together. Even the settlements the aliens have look like crap. You'd think they'd do a little better, but maybe they're only soldiers, not architects of city planners. Lot of sickly greens and purples to give it a disgusting, diseased look. Effective if you want to convey that the details don't really matter much to Charl13.
2 comments:
Char13 reminds me of Boba Fett for some reason. Maybe it's the colour scheme and the cape.
I would bet there's a certain amount of inspiration being taken from Fett. Charl13's helmet/skull even has the same "T" shaped opening for the eyes and mouth as Boba, although Charl13's opening is a bit larger.
No jetpack, though!
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