2 out of 5

Jesus, what goddamn mess.  As of late (or as of always), I’ve criticized Image for being all about the first impression: knowing an idea that sounds great and getting some amazing designers to package it really beautifully, but lacking the actual content to make it any more than just another flash-in-the-pan idea… that will nonetheless grab the public’s attention for a lot of quoatable quotes to slap on the second issue post your first issue success.  So I can’t critique the business model, I can just respond by shrugging my shopping shoulders.  This is a method many have mined, of course, including Vertigo for years now (although there’s hope that they’re getting a bit back to their roots of Story First), but Image upped the ante by giving the system a sense of cultural awareness.  The books look cool and pitch cool, so you can be cool comic guy and drop some Image references and not necessarily feel like you’re a trendster.

Goners is not this.  Semahn and crew’s intentions with Goners – to recreate a Goonies-esque adventure in comics – reads legitimately, and the packaging design matches that vibe, with a fun title logo splashed over a big and bad highlighted monster on each cover.  And the first issue, excepting a somewhat silly cliffhanger, fulfilled that promise and more, with an intro that promised tragedy to come (also made clear in the pre-story summary, that this is “the end of (the) story”), and then a breath-taking run to the finish line that quickly establishes the family Latimer as a generation-after-generation troupe of protectors – now with their own film crew – in a world where ‘the mortal co-exists with the mythic.’  The current generation Latimer children watch mom and dad in their latest skirmish on TV.  Things go horribly wrong for the parents, and immediately it seems a protection spell around the children has been lifted, and they are beset from all angles by creepy crawlies, pant pant.  Cue book 2.  It was perfect big-idea encapsulation, boiled down to a quick but packed issue, with excitingly stylized art (think Duncan Rouleau) from Jorge Corona and non-distinctive but effective colors from Gabriel Cassata.  The second issue seems a bit assumptive on characterization (‘Hey, remember these people you’ve never seen before?  Well, you should have feelings for them!’), but is mostly an extended chase – wwwith another dumb cliffhanger – so it works.  And then issue three it starts to go to shit, and the series becomes one of the most bloated examples of scope creep ever.

Semahn simply tried to do too much, his ideas trickling into sequel-itis (as in one sub-plot, one baddie too many, except multiplied by 100) before even completing the first story.  Bits and pieces of mythology and narrative are scattered across the series, with elements that are never clarified mentioned only in the pre-issue summaries.  This is somewhat classic newbie scripting, where the story is all in your head and won’t you please just understand it?  I called out the cliffhangers because they’re examples of this problem that can be spotted in the issues of this arc that obviously worked enough for me to keep reading; that you’d stuff your book with creepos and blood and guts and chases and wall-smashing and bullet dodging and then think an ominous knock at the door is somehow ‘thrilling’ speaks to a scripter who just has all of these patchwork ideas that are impatiently being jammed together.  The overall effect of this is such that, while I have no doubt you can explain to me every detail of the story, when the pacing requires extreme narration and location jumps from page to page, with new world-building terms and unexplained concepts dropped panel to panel, I start to not give a fuck.  The world is ending every page; I figure I’ll be caught up in next issue’s pre-issue summary.

But again, the intention felt legit.  The too-eager execution just quickly catches up with you.

Corona’s expressive art helps to reign in the madness a bit.  This super-stylized style tends to lose fore- mid- background separation and thus get a little jumbled to the eye, but there are plenty of awesome splash pages with tons o’ brawling that still read easily and keep the fun vibe rumbling despite the writing stumbles.  It will be interesting to watch the artist in the years to come to see him hone his style into something even stronger and more identifiable as truly his own.

So I’m off the Goners ride for now, though I’m glad I had the chance to check the book out to put the creators on my radar, and to be able to add to the pile of Image titles that don’t personify my criticisms of the publisher.