By: Ron Marz (writer), Kenneth Rocafort (art), Sunny Gho (colors) & Troy Peteri (letters)
The Story: Velocity is in a race against time to save her friends in this BEAUTIFUL comic book.
What’s Good: The attraction for this book is Kenneth Rocafort. The man is a beast of an artist and should be on the list of names to buy regardless of what they are drawing. Rocafort just has the complete package for an artist: excellent linework on humans creating realistic and dynamic characters, wonderful page layout skills so that we never have pages with 4 boring widescreen panels and interesting use of perspective because in comics “the camera” can be positioned ANYWHERE. Rocafort makes Velocity look fast without often resorting to squiggly lines and smears of color in her wake. That is a real feat! He makes his characters look “real” without it appearing that he is tracing over a photograph. Really, the guy is incredible, but a cheer should also go up from the crowd for Sunny Gho as this is a wonderfully colored book. Everything is just rich, textured and beautiful.
As for the story, it is very straightforward and enjoyable: A bad guy has infected Velocity’s teammates with a virus that will kill them all in one hour and Velocity is the only one who is fast enough to get the cure to all of them in time. That’s it, but it serves as a very simple way for Top Cow to introduce their CyberForce and HunterKiller teams (of which Velocity is a part) without making a reader feel as if they need to buy a bunch of trade paperbacks to understand the story of this issue.
What’s Not So Good: Very little. One could complain that the story is very paint-by-numbers, but if it had more depth (to start with) it would not be new reader friendly. And there is NOTHING wrong with any aspect of the art.
Conclusion: Must see this issue. Rocafort is a member of the “must buy” club until he screws something up.
Grade: A–
– Dean Stell