Comic Related - If It's Comic Related, You'll Find It Here!

Welcome to another edition of the Why I Love column, where I, Eric Ratcliffe, pick something I've read, played, listened to or watched to discuss with you fair readers. This week we talk about the launch of a new ongoing series at Image with art by rising star Joe Eisma! I am talking of course about Morning Glories! The series has been described as Lost meets the Runaways and boy how much did that hit right on the mark?

For those longterm listeners and readers of the column and the podcast, you know I've been a follower of Joe's work for a longtime. I remember hearing about this series and my curiosity being peaked right off the bat. I openly admit to never previously checking out Nick Spencer's work but after reading this, I might have to.

The book starts off in a classroom as the teacher interrupts some note passing. Soon we are following an escape attempt with no real elaboration with what exactly is going on. This sets up the mystery of the series perfectly as, by the end of this scene. a character is dead and the adults continue a plot which we can only assume is nothing good.

Starting on page 16, we are introduced to our cast of six main characters who are all teenagers and they each share something very peculiar in common. The introduction to each character is unique and they all have very different personalities. It's easy to pick who you want to route for in these pages and we even get some nice mysteries introduced with some of the characters.

This leads me to talking about our break out star in my opinion for the cast, Ike. He's like Marvel Comics' Amadeus Cho if he didn't have a soul. He seems to think he's better than everyone else and may or may not have killed his own father. We also have Casey who seems to be our "every girl" in the book. There is the manipulative beautiful girl Zoe and our male equal to Casey in Hunter who seems to come from a troubles family. Our crew is rounded out by the hero Fukayama Jun and our young horror writer Jade.

Each character has something in their personality that makes them unique. I really enjoy the full cast and Jade's breakdown is easily identified with. When they finally reach the school the mystery starts to unveil itself a bit more as we are reintroduced to the teacher from the beginning of the issue and our extremely peppy RA who is just a bit too happy to meet new people.

I also love the cliffhanger on the last page as it seems Casey has found herself in a bit of trouble. All in all this is 100 percent how you correctly do a first issue. I almost forgot to mention that issue #1 was just $3.50 for 44 pages of story! I have to commend Nick and Joe for that alone.

Joe's art has changed up a bit here. It's similar to what we got in Serpo and Dummies Guide To Danger which is good and his style remains incredibly unique. I am curious to find out what kind of research Nick put into this series and how he determined he'd build the mystery like this. I also really like the mysterious killer hiding in the school and hope we learn more about him in the issues to come.

Verdict is that anyone that loved the Runaways needs to check this out. It's a strong story with awesome artwork. This will be a book I will watch very closely!