FIRST ISSUE: SOLDIER ZERO

An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode”—that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

The first title in the much ballyhooed return of Stan Lee to funnybooks is now out, Soldier Zero. But Lee, I suspect, had very little to do with the book: he’s listed as “Grand Poobah,” but the writing credit goes to Paul Cornell with art by Javier Pina (albeit “character design” by Dave Johnson). Lee’s contribution is doubtless confined pretty much to conjuring the concept. And at first blush, the concept looks like Iron Man all over again. At second blush, however, the touted “reality comics” aspect of the Boom series is evident and novel.

The inaugural issue opens with two pages showing an armored being flying through the air, shooting daggers of light from his hands. Iron Man. Then we meet Stewart Trautman, whose service in Afghanistan has left him crippled and confined to a wheelchair. He and another wheelchair personage, a woman, can’t gain access to a grocery store because the store is two steps up from street level and their chairs on wheels don’t negotiate stairs. Part of this concept’s mission, it appears, is to lobby for wheelchair rights. Good work. And, in a later incident in which a helpful acquaintance reaches to the top shelf in the school library to get a book for Trautman, we learn that people in wheelchairs don’t like to think of themselves as helpless, and help of the sort just depicted makes Trautman feel helpless even though he doesn’t think of himself that way. More reality; more good work.

Later, we go on Trautman’s first date with a pretty young woman who, we are persuaded, found Trautman attractive enough to accept a date with him. In the midst of their conversation, they are interrupted by an explosion that buries them under the rubble of the building. Up to his waist in rubble, Trautman is able to hold a slab of concrete suspended over the unconscious body of his would-be girlfriend, Lily, until he is somehow transmorgrified into the armored being that we saw cavorting on the book’s opening pages. We don’t know how, exactly, that transformation occurs. Or why. And in fact, whether it occurs is only dimly hinted at. And the book ends there.

The first issue incorporates at least two complete episodes — the grocery store protest and the date with Lily — and Trautman seems an admirable hero: he’s common-sensical about his disability, which he faces matter-of-factly. We want to know what his connection is with the iron-suited being, and we like him well enough to look into the second issue to learn what that connection might be.

The storytelling — pacing, perspective, panel breakdown — is thoroughly professional: it accomplishes its job without flash or fillagree. And Pina’s drawings are likewise thoroughly professional. Actually, they are somewhat better than the run-of-the-mill professional artwork we see so much of today: instead of a lot of compulsive shadowy modeling, often so clumsily done as to distort facial expression and anatomy — the usual shtick these days — we have naked linear drawing, no shading, no cross-hatching. No linear embellishment at all. Straight-forward, unencumbered linework.

Drawing of this kind readily reveals the artist’s failings whenever he fails, but Pina never does. The nuances of modeling are handled with color, expertly laid in by Alfred Rockefeller.

Altogether a successful first issue — and one that is more appealing than I would have expected with Lee at the helm. He wrote well for his time, but times have changed since Lee’s heyday. Too often since leaving the typewriter at Marvel, he has invented new heroes by simply repeating himself. Here, presumably thanks mostly to Cornell, we have something a bit fresher.