Well, readers of the Broken Infinite, I'm back again and this time I'm stepping away from mecha and countdowns to bring you a review. This week we're looking at volume 1 of the webcomic series Stealth by William Satterwhite.
Review by Jeremias de Leon
Story
Like any good superhero comic the first pages of the comic are all about setting up who the hero is. After a beat down of some street thugs the reader is shown glimpses of the hero Allen White's high school life, how he got his powers and why he does what he does. His reasons for fighting crime are something I want to go into a little bit more right now. Allen's brother was a police officer who had no power and was dedicated to fighting crime that one day was murdered in the line of duty. Before this incident Allen already had his powers but did not use them to defend others. After realizing how dedicated his brother was to helping others and fighting crime even though he was a normal human Allen made a promise to his dead brother to use his power to do what his brother did.
This first volume of this webcomic is pretty much what I mentioned in the second sentence of the first paragraph. It shows Allen beating down evildoers, and goes into his personal life and relationships with other characters especially at his high school. During the volume though there's some story building with a record company executive named Mario Malone and his brother. By the end of the first volume you won't entirely know what's going on with the record company just that there's betrayals and a lot going on and none of it will be good for Allen.
Art
The first volume of Stealth seems to have been drawn traditionally, which isn't surprising, the website mentions that Stealth was actually started way back in 2001. It seemed like it when the art wasn't scanned in at too high of a resolution, which again, makes sense since it's being put on the web and not for print but perhaps the resolution was scaled a bit too far back for the first 3 issues of the first volume. The artwork seems a bit too blurry.
Other than that the style is actually great for this kind of story. It has a kind of noir feel to it and with the way the story was building up to be a crime drama with the record company executives and with the personal drama of Allen's school life.
Characters
The main character Allen White is a high school senior who seems to possess a genius level intellect. The comic states that he gets good grades, is in advanced classes and everyone seems to ask him for help on their schoolwork. He's also a very dedicated young man. He doesn't go through the motions when protecting people he honestly does want to make the city he lives in a better place. Also despite his teenage hormones affecting him and making him think about his high school crush he also seems to have his head on straight when it comes to crime fighting, he doesn't slack off and he never shows off. Something commendable for a comic hero at his age.
The girl that Allen likes Ashley Belle at first glance seems to just be a typical cheerleader but later on is quite more complicated than that and receives a lot of development.
Mario Malone the music executive and all the characters he's involved with are very interesting. I'd even say that you could take Stealth and his high school problems out and you'd be left with an interesting crime drama. Not that Allen himself isn't interesting.
Verdict
Whether it really is "the world's greatest superhero comic" I will leave to you. But it certainly is a good one. Some plot elements and dialog are a bit commonplace but overall it's still enjoyable.
I give Stealth an 8 out of 10
You can read Stealth here http://stealthcomic.com/
I would suggest that they have a button that takes readers back to the first page, furthermore, they should have a buttons on the bottom of their pages that let readers go page by page instead of forcing the reader to click back on their browser to read the additional pages.
ReplyDeletePeople online may just abandon the comic automatically for not having the ease of reading it page after page. Also, it’s hard to know which page to read when you go to each issue chapter, as the first page for each issue chapter actually starts at the bottom and not on the top and the dates are very small to actually compose which page was posted when. They would be better to number each page along with the dates, so readers know this is page 15, 16, 17, etc, etc.
It took me like 5-6 minutes to figure the reading order. At first when I read the comic it was very disjointed, and made no sense until I figured this out. As it stands right now the site is very hard to navigate.
Other than that, good luck team Stealth.
Thanks very much for the review, it is very much appreciated!
ReplyDeleteJake, I'm glad you made that comment, I've been so concerned with the Stealth graphic novel I'm trying to put together that I hadn't even realized that the comic navigation had somehow gotten out of wack. This has been corrected/fixed.
William, glad to have been able to help. Keep up the good work. :)
ReplyDeleteAlthough the navigation is a bit disjointing, as a long time reader of Stealth it wasn't make or break deal.
ReplyDeletePretty much dropped all mainstream floppies once I re-discovered manga, do enjoy still reading Stealth.
Hope it's around for a while.
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