Like last Friday, I’m getting an early jump on the Blog Extra! This weekend: a look at a new title from the folks at Devil’s Due.
DRAFTED #1 is written by Mark Powers and drawn by Chris Lie. The story certainly doesn’t have small aims; we begin in the aftermath of large earthquakes which have wiped out Berlin and Ottawa, and those have occurred after bizarre disasters in Jerusalem and St. Louis. Only one thing is known for sure: people are dying by the thousands and nothing about any of it makes sense. But it all becomes plainly, horrifically clear when an alien race arrives and announces itself to every soul on the planet at one time. They have come to enlist the Earth’s population in a war against a great evil, and if we cooperate, we get all sorts of goodies. Refuse to assist, and they’ll wipe us out completely… using very similar methods to what they’ve done to our world so far. Human civilization as we know it is at an end either way… so can people put aside their differences and work together to save the species? Or is humanity about to go the way of the dinosaur?Like a classic Hollywood mega-blockbuster, DRAFTED brings together an international cast, places them in danger, and jams the plot into motion. Certainly, as hard as Powers tries, none of the characters come across as anything but stock, but that isn’t necessarily a flaw. We’re meant at this point to get only a slight glimpse, and any development will occur as each one faces the horrors ahead.
As a fan of the disaster genre, I liked DRAFTED maybe more than I should have. Honestly, not enough happens here; we’re not even at the point of the series when we find out exactly what the title truly means yet, and there was a preview issue before this one. Still, Powers and Lie get a lot of latitude from me on this one, so I’m counting on them to come through.
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/Mason
