3 out of 5

While the ‘in on the joke’ tone gets a little fuzzy, Dan Boultwood’s ‘It Came!’ succeeds as madly readable entertainment thanks to its dedication to remaining in character as a B-Movie, with an interesting color scheme and page filter bringing out the desired B&W film stock quality and the inclusion of world-building film ads and actor bios keeping the gag going fully from cover to cover.  For once, the plot really can be summed up without me pretending to sum it up and then rambling on about it for nine pages: aliens attack the UK.  Thankfully, Dr. Boy and his assistant Doris (‘cast’ by Dick Claymore and Fanny Flaunders) are on hand to cavort from town to town – issue to issue – trying to warn the army and just escaping laser beams before the discovery of what powers the attackers and, as the lampooned genre demands, the accidental ‘science’ that ends up being what saves the day.

Firstly – the book is very British and makes no bones about it.  There are plenty of jokes at the country’s expense that don’t have any aside to clue us Americans in on it, and while we can get the gist of most of it, some it is just assumed to be humorous based on the timing.  The second layer of this is the hilarious verbiage used throughout, both a perversion of the era and hoidy-toidy upper class talk, Doris referred to as ‘0ld (something or other)’ at every opportunity – i.e. old tuft, old clanger – and Boy’s frequent overt sexism and ridiculous exclamations.  Not to mention a lovely stereotypical dash of plenty of tea and crumpets.  So this all ends up being something of a plus, as its nice to read a book go straight for parody without pandering to its audience.  Even when Americans are making fun of American tropes, there’s a tendency to write an extra nudge into the script so ya get it, and there’s none of that here.  Either you’re laughing or you move on.

Second – overall, Boultwood’s art is great.  He has a great sense of acting and the angles chosen for his ‘camera’ always attribute an amazing amount of motion, highlighted further by the artist’s ability to direct the eye in panel.  Slight panel variations also do much to keep the pages fresh.  However, there are some gaps.  Anything that depicts a grand moment of action, or a more drawn out motion (more than just an implied direction) feels rather static.  The characters and background also have this awesome 90s animation look to them (‘Iron Giant’ coming to mind), which actually works really well with the B-movie setting (sorry, 90s animation), but then there are certain elements that were computered in – the UFO, namely, and some explosion effects – that just look out of place.  The UFO can be partly explained by the need to cheese it up (it’s a nice touch drawing in the string to hold the ‘model’ since this is supposed to be a cheap film, after all), but it breaks the vibe of the book all the same.  A good idea, just ends up being a bit off once it made its way to the page.

Third – my main nit.  There’s a cheesy, pulpy atmosphere from the get go, so it ventures close to overkill whenever the characters pause to remark on something being ridiculous.  Thankfully, Dan keeps it all pretty ‘zany,’ so it doesn’t cross the line to being too wink-wink, but it’s certainly a balancing act.  However, if the ‘world’ of It Came! expands in the sense of further mini-series as movies, this style could become a hallmark of the work and be pretty awesome.  So I make note of it now as something that kept my hackles raised a bit, but time might soothe my judgmental beast.

Now I hate to put the main praise on something strictly external, but the book’s design is fantastic.  Several comics have tried to accomplish an old timey vibe through different effects, either treatments to the page, or color washes, or the artist drawing in a particular style, but it took something out of the box to really make it work this well.  Favoring a dusky blue palette and a mottled, greyish background that bleeds through the whites of the panels, there’s never a question as to what style the book is trying to achieve… which, womp, is quite an achievement.  It says ‘Designed By Russell Seal with Dan Bura.’  If it’s all on them, they made the book.  Without this design scheme, Boultwood’s script would’ve hit just a little further off to the side… to the extent that it might not’ve been as entertaining.

Silly fun, which I think is all it was aiming for.