Comics Review: "Sundowners" #1

- by Señor Editor, 29 August 2014

When Tim Seeley does some creator-owned stuff, it’s usually pretty aces. “Hack/Slash”, “Revival” – that’s some good stuff. The various stuff for the Big Two? Sorta ehhh… But the creator-owned stuff? It’s top quality. So when I heard that there’s a new ongoing on Dark Horse called “Sundowners”, by Seeley and Jim Terry, I was in, son. 

Click to enlarge, sucker.

“Sundowners” is sort of a superhero book. Now, if you follow my reviews on this site, you should probably know by now that I’m not very excited for most modern superhero comics. But “Sundowners” is not about secret identities, fighting villains and facing universe-threatening beings. It’s about a support group for people who dress up in costumes and come out at night to play superhero. And in issue #1 we’re not even sure if they’re just legitimately crazy people, living in some fantasy they made up for themselves, or if they’re actually “super”.

The focal character of the story is David “Shreds” Shrejic, who is a psychologist and  apparently a man with a share of his own problems. But things are about to change for David, because he came upon a brand new disorder, completely undiagnosed. David, is treating “sundowners”, that is people who play superheroes and are affected by what the shrink called “sundown syndrome”. After a short introduction to the concept, we get to witness one of the group’s meetings for ourselves.

His group consists of 5 people, but the fifth one (“Mr. Outsider” – they all refer to each other by their “night names” during the meetings) isn’t present on the meeting in #1. The ones we do meet are Crowlita, Concerned Citizen, Arcanika and, uh, Karl (he’s an older guy who used to go by “The Patient Wolf”).

Dave getting ready for the meeting.

As each of them talk about what happened to them recently, we start to see that apparently all these “sundowners” have been experiencing very weird events lately. The only problem is, none of them are really reliable narrators.

That certainly adds a lot of very interesting mystery to the comic. All of them seem shaken up with something that happened recently, but it’s tough to know whether it’s just their delusions or not. The Concerned Citizen regularly watches out for “Reptiloids” in his neighborhood, so when he says something unusual happened to him , it’s a little tough to believe him. 

The Concerned Citizen.

Arcanika believes that the more bad deeds she does, the more “power of the God’s Chosen” she gets. So, she commits petty crimes that in turn are supposed to power her up for superheroics, but then again she just might be a delusional kleptomaniac, like David suspects. The issue ends on one hell of an odd cliffhanger, though, making me suspect there’s a lot more to their stories.

Arkanica.

Seeley is great at writing bizarre mysteries, and he doesn’t disappoint this time around either. The cast of characters he introduces are all very interesting and different from each other.

A lot of my enjoyment of this issue also came from Jim Terry’s art. His style is equally well-suited to the superheroic (or “pretend superheroics”, I guess) scenes, as it is to scenes of people sitting around awkwardly and confessing about their “night” life. In a series about a therapy group, that really helps make things exciting.

And it IS exciting. This is one of the best first issues I’ve seen lately, and it got me hooked and waiting for more. If you’re looking for a good new and unusual title to add to your pull list, I highly recommend giving “Sundowners” a try. It’s one of the best things Dark Horse published lately and it deserves your full attention.


Have you read “Sundowners” #1 yet? Are all these people just having mental problems or is there more to it? How GREAT was this issue?! Sound off in the comments! 

Tagged: comics, Reviews.

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