Comics Review: "Winterworld" #0

- by Ninja Ross, 4 March 2015

It’s Spring! The sun is more or less shining, the flowers are more or less blooming and birds are doing that thing they do. The summer is on its way! Flip flops and stuff! Aren’t you all looking forward to it? Well, I’m not. Spring and Summer are happy seasons. I hate happy.

Click to enlarge.

Good thing we have the cold, horrible Winterworld to make things nice and cold. Yay snow!

Although I have never read the original Winterworld, I am reliably informed (BY GOOGLE) that it’s about the world being covered in ice and snow. A really long winter, if you will.

Created by writer Chuck Dixon and artist Jorge Zaffino, the series followed Scully, a trader who travels from outpost to outpost, trading and scavenging from the remains of civilisation. He eventually saves a young girl by the name of Wynn. Together, they do adventure stuff in the snow. And Scully has a badger named Rahrah. Issue 0, unfortunately, is numbered 0 because of the amount of badger action it contains. Instead, we learn a bit more about Wynn’s history.

Wynn spent some time under the rule of a group of survivors/bandits who would make kids run “The Wheel,” which gave them electricity. If you couldn’t move the wheel, you were fed to the guard dogs. This wouldn’t be a problem if Conan were here, of course; he’d walk all over them! He would hear the lamentations of their women!

In the future, Wheel of Fortune became much more extreme.

When it seemed like things couldn’t get worse, Father Johns enters the scene, shooting up bad guys and throwing around bible quotes like he doesn’t give a crap.

Father Johns seems like a pretty cool character. He steps out of the shadows, takes out the bad guys and rescues the kids. He’s a stylish guy! He takes them to his hideout, where everyone is treated fairly and pulls their own weight.

It’s a pretty basic origin story in its own way, but it’s told pretty well. It never gets stale or melodramatic, which is the case for a lot of flashback issues in other comic books. This origin story has the right amount of emotion, but it’s mostly about how Wynn survived. How she came to live with Johns and how she learned to read, which seems to be a pretty important aspect of the character.

Johns is here!

It’s harsh at times, especially when we see how things work with the bandits at the beginning. But it’s not overly harsh. It’s the right amount of grim and hopeless. It’s subtle.

Dixon’s script is well paced, bouncing around without missing anything. Each story element feels fresh and interesting and Wynn makes a good narrator.

Unfortunately, Jorge Zaffino passed away in 2002. Instead, we have Tommy Lee Edwards illustrating the book. Edwards’ style is put to great use, here; he offers a suitably dark, gritty atmosphere that matches Dixon’s script perfectly. It’s nice and gloomy.

BANG BANG!

His characters are sharp and focused, but he never loses the post apocalyptic feel. Everyone looks dirty and upset, but in a real nice way. the expressions of horror and gloom on everyone’s face look great, helping to make things feel believable.

This is a pretty great jumping on point. It works well enough as a standalone story, but, more importantly, it makes you want to read more in the series. The world created by Dixon and Zaffino seems harsh and interesting and this expansion upon that is definitely worth checking out before the new limited series is released in May.


Are you reading the new "Winterworld" comics? How do you think they compare to the OG black & white series? Leave us a comment, or you can feed the dogs.

Tagged: comics, Reviews.

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