3 out of 5

Stray is an ambitious but ultimately generic comic, Kickstartered and then wrapped into Action Lab’s humble and well-intentioned mini hero-universe (‘The Actionverse’) and brought to life by NY Jim Hanley guy Vito Delsante.  As with many New Hero-in-Tights-type book, it’s hard not to look at parallels to existing heroes – which are inevitably an influence on a creator, whether intended to be channeled or not – and the dog-themed good guy of our book certainly slots into the Batman mold.  But it’s not a pastiche, and despite extending to include a Justice League proxy (‘Pax Mundi’ – again, unavoidable that any group of supers is going to look like Avengers or the League), Rodney, a.k.a. Rottweiler, a.k.a. spoiler but the title of the book is Stray so, yeah, eventually that’s the mantle he takes – Rodney, via Delsante’s scripting and Sean Izaakse’s artwork, stands on his own, along with the other players who pop up for a few pages here and there.  He’s got the on-the-edge vigilante, banter, and dead-parents bit down, but still: ‘Rotty’ – Robin to his Batman father The Doberman – within the pages of Stray, establishes his own identity in his own world.

That world, alas, is cluttered with some heavy-handed tropes: power struggles, hero bickering, confusing villain plots that only one person figures out just in time and etcetera, and the series, compressed down to four issues, undermines some of its interesting character setup by throttling through events way too quickly.  It’s a frustrating dichotomy, setting up a book that you really want to like because a dog themed hero is like, duh (something that’s touched on in the letters pages) and said hero gets an actual personality – and a pretty badass costume – but after a slick intro issue, the following three books are a bit too jam-packed to really settle in to, leaving you interested but wanting more.  Which isn’t a bad place to wind up on the last page, especially if we do end up getting more Stray, but if this ends up being all we get, it’s a tad underwhelming for all its sound and fury.

The art has a similar A Lot / A Little mash-up feeling to it, exemplified by a fight scene with the main baddie in the final issue.  Izaakse’s layouts, paired with (then) Ross Campbell’s well-tempered colors – seriously, the book lays down a lot of yellow while still remaining ‘dark,’ it’s pretty awesome – are damned intricate, snapshotting the fight such that, in each panel, you get a full sense of movement and impact.  And when the fight ends you understand how it went, but on the actual pages, it feels like some moments are missing.  And true, this could, in part, fall on the script, but it’s a sensibility that subsists through the whole series: that Delsante and Sean vigorously edited the story to be as compact as possible, which sacrificed some inbetween moments that might’ve lessened the obviousness of stringing together the aforementioned tropes.

Definitely enjoyable.  Let’s hope there’s more.

Maybe minus some points for featuring the sidekick dog driving a car on the cover of issue 3 but that not happening in the contents.