3 out of 5

Butch Guice’s art is jaw-dropping.  Chuck Dixon’s writing is erratic.  In the future… …and some more dots… the world has become an arctic wasteland.  Maybe this is explained more in the original Winter World series.  That’s fine.  The first three pages of issue #1 set up an ominous tone: nice, widescreen panels, a lone character stalking across a blank white plain of snow, horror building with the sparse narration boxes as the ice seems to break apart around this character…  And then we switch to curmudgeon Scully and his 14 year old companion, Wynn (and their super cute badger pet Rah-Rah), wandering about at night for transportation, for shelter, for food.  They run into some crazy ice locals.  There’s a chase.  To be continued.

Dixon has been the scribe on a ton of classic titles – and I’ll be reading his take on Titan Comics’ Alien Legion reboot – but whenever I sample his writing, I find similar hiccups that make it difficult for me to get into it.  ‘Winter World’ encompasses these: that we’re really given no reason to want to read about Scully, Wynn, or this world of winter, and that events seem to sputter into dramatics without any real build up.  Why are these crazy ice locals a threat beyond that they’re chanting and chasing our leads?  We get the context, because, well, it’s clear, but it’s almost like we’ve arrived in the middle of a story.  Which I guess you could say we have, since this is a second volume, but then juxtaposing that with those first three pages, which are all ‘welcome to Winter World’ introduction, feels a bit jarring.

But Dixon obviously has a grasp on his characters and his world, and I’d believe that, with continued issues, the reader could be easily fooled into thinking that we’ve been given more background than we have, simply due to the confidence with which it’s presented.  And Guice makes what could’ve been bland panels of look-alike characters (all wearing fur coats) on white backgrounds mini-masterpieces of mood, with Diego Rodriguez’s colors giving us a gorgeous range within a selection of blacks and blues.  So it’s definitely a nice book to flip through, with individual moments coming across very strong.  If you’re used to Dixon’s style of setup and pacing, ‘Winter World’ is a fun read.  If you’re not used to it, this might not be the book to sell you, or you might want to wait for a trade’s worth of materials to weigh in so you can get a better idea of the full picture.