1 out of 5

I hate being tough on super duper indie stuff.  Regardless of the elements that earmark it as what it is – something rather amateurish – I understand that it took time and effort to make it happen.  But, at the same time, theoretically any creative effort is produced with the hopes of a positive response, whether it’s at a major publisher or smaller; maybe it just seems like it hits closer to the “home” of the artist the tinier the operation gets because there’s less room for those involved to point fingers and say it’s editorial’s fault or the publisher’s fault or etc.

Regardless, Null Patrol, which I picked up at a junk shop and appears to be from the 80s B&W boom, is not that great.  The art, where more time was probably involved – the cover, the opening splash page, an “extra” short that was included at book’s end (apparently the first story of the characters, so drawn before publishing an ongoing may have been the idea) – shows promise, but still has that herky-jerk “something’s off” feeling that plagues newbie art, stemming mostly from poorly executed perspective and a stiff hand (via artist Kirk Durfey) that had yet to really find its own style.  The rest of the book suffers from timing issues, framing issues, shading issues, and etcetera.  Again, effort involved, but this is clearly an early effort.  The story – something something two one-dimensional characters have some slapstick foibles and forget to establish why we should care about their tale as they collect space junk and dream of becoming ‘Astro-Patrol’ commanders, something they may achieve if not waylaid by a monster which is 100% plot-stuffing and unimportant except to give us closer to thirty pages.  The “extra” story does more for establishing things than the main comic.  There’s also a one-page strip at the end by “R. Becker” that’s entertaining in a classic comics sense, as it drops you in the middle of pulp and has one of those oddball non-ending endings old newspaper-style one-page adventures would have.