2 out of 5

An interesting premise and visually impressive kaiju / mecha art doesn’t quite line up for a consistent reading experience.

“We Ride Titans” proposes a world where regularly-appearing kaiju are battled by locally-operated mechas, with our first issue focusing on the squabbles amongst the Hobbs family, and who will be running their “titan” – a reckless brother, or Kit, the estranged sister who’s being called in after her brother’s kaiju-fighting faux pas.

Writer Tres Dean does a good job of establishing this through subtext and without heavy-handed narration, and it’s a very promising setup, allowing for much lore expansion and also good comic book soap opera. However, beat by beat, this is a very strangely paced issue, especially for a first one, spending way too much time on downbeats in conversations and, though perhaps purposefully delaying much action (beyond an opening splash) so as to keep the focus on the characters, Tres forgets to reinject momentum into the story that’s on the page. Combined with how dialogue is spread out too much, it makes for a lot of perceived downtime, and sucks out the punch of the interactions between Kit and her family.

How much of this is script versus Sebastian Piriz’s artistic interpretation of that script is, of course, unknown. Piriz’s character and especially kaiju / mech designs are solid – the latter looking very cool, mixing in unique but “accurate” details that give the series’ creatures and robots their own feel – but the camera work and geography is iffy during our opening battle sequence, not quite capturing where participants are in the scuffle in relation to one another, and capturing the actions somewhat after the right moment for impact. In the dialogue sequences, it’s very bizarre, as it’s like 100 actions happen between panel A and B, with the actual words suggesting it’s only been a beat. It’s a bizarre time dilation effect that compounds with the aforementioned way Dean allows moments to stretch on for too long. And it’s not that more (or less) should happen in the issue, but the way it’s timed is problematic in both regards: too much happens that we’re not seeing, and / or what we witness takes too long to visually occur.

Both of these come across as youthful errors that could be corrected in time, though We Ride Titans #1 unfortunately doesn’t set up enough intrigue regarding its characters and story to necessitate following to #2. However, the premise is definitely cool enough that if someone handed me a second issue – or I stumbled across a trade – I wouldn’t put up a fuss to give it another go.