Blue Estate #1

Written by Viktor Kalvachev, Kosta Yanev, and Andrew Osborne
Art by Viktor Kalvachev, Toby Cypress, Nathan Fox, and Robert Valley

I didn't know what to expect going in to this comic.  I don't pay a lot of attention to soliciations beyond the creators' names, preferring to let preview pages speak for themselves.  I like the work of both Toby Cypress and Nathan Fox, and Image has been on fire of late, so I thought I'd give this a shot.

It's a hard comic to judge based on the first issue.  Kalvachev and friends have a pretty complicated story to tell, so this issue is mostly just about arranging some of the chess pieces on the board, and introducing them to the reader.  I don't really know what this comic is going to be about, beyond the fact that it has something to do with an aging action star, a drunk actress, a Russian mobster, the cop who has been hunting him for years, and that cop's fat useless private eye son.  How this is going to play out is very much up in the air.

There is a recurrent Law & Order motif at play here.  The issue opens on the PI watching an episode of Special Victims Unit, and the opening narration at first appears to be the introduction to the comic.  After that, whenever the narration moves to a new location, the familiar 'Dun Dun' sound is used.  It's a cute touch.

The art is cool in this comic.  I thought that having so many cooks in the kitchen would create a wildly inconsistent feel for the book, but somehow it works out just fine.  There is a roughness to the look of this book, and it seems fitting for the type of story that is being told.  I'll probably pick up the next issue to see where this is all headed.