Zero #1

Written by Ales Kot
Art by Michael Walsh

I was disappointed to see that Ales Kot got booted off of DC's Suicide Squad.  His Change mini-series was interesting, if a little hard to follow, but with the Squad, he was showing a new linear-ity to his writing.  On the upside, though, not writing corporate-owned comics gives more time for a book like Zero.

This first issue introduces us to Zero, a soldier who works for 'The Agency', a shadowy organization that we assume is American, but could just as well be British.  Zero has been sent to Israel to retrieve some technology that has been used to augment a Hamas soldier, who is currently in the middle of a pitched battle with one of Israel's own augmented soldiers.  Zero has disguised himself as a tank operator in the IDF, and has to figure out just how he's going to complete his mission without getting discovered.

There is a framing sequence set far into the future (the rest of the book is set a little into the future), where an aged Zero sits at the side of a cliff, with a young boy holding a gun to his head.  The rest of the comic is supposedly the story that he tells the boy, although at this point, much is left to the reader to figure out.

Kot has a good handle on the augmented soldier genre, and sets this up to be a pretty interesting story.  Michael Walsh, who did such a good job on Comeback, reminds me a lot of Paul Azaceta in this issue, and has a good feel for this sort of action.  This is a good new series.