Abbott 1973 #1
BOOM! Studios 2021
Written by Saladin Ahmed
Illustrated by Sami Kivelä
Coloured by Mattia Iacono
Lettered by Jim Campbell
Detroit's hardest hitting journalist, Elena Abbott, is trying to make a fresh start at a new newspaper... but her deadly past isn't ready to let go. The city is days away from the historic election of a Black candidate as their new Mayor, but a vicious new group has emerged to destroy him, targeting anyone who supports his campaign or the change he represents. That means Abbott, who discovers the group's connection to a dangerous dark magic, has been targeted for certain death -- unless she embraces her true power as the Lightbringer to save her city.
I really like the idea of this being an alternate history story one where Elena is the unwilling recipient of the Lightbringer that leaves it up to her to save the city. I like she is one of the city’s best and hardest hitting reporters and that after the last arc the City of Detroit is gearing up for it’s first black mayor as well. With her openness to having male and female lovers it’s great to see a woman of colour being given so much range in a book like this. The opening here is everything that we want to see in an opening as it has the ambiguous clan of bad guys whom meet in secrecy to plan their next move. All the while they admit that their previous agent wasn’t near enough up to the task at hand.
I am very much enjoying the way that this is being told. The story & plot development tahta we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented extremely well. How we see this being structured as well as how the layers within the story emerge and play against one another as it keeps us moving forward looking for what is the reality and what’s the red herring. The character development that we see really is quite superb and as we see how they act and react to the circumstances and situations that they encounter as well as how we see the dialogue helps to really flesh these characters out nicely. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing the twists & turns along the way we are treated to the beginning of an exciting new chapter in Elena’s life.
The interiors here are really quite lovely to see. I like the strength of the linework and how through the varying weights we see the amount of detail work on these pages. There is also this amazing variations in techniques as well depending on what it is we are seeing and the two contrast each other beautifully. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a remarkable eye for storytelling. While we see a lot of backgrounds being utilised it never hurts to see more of them because honestly they really do wonders in fleshing out the moments. The colour work is utterly fantastic! From the darker imagery full of purples and those beautiful hues and tones within it to the everyday hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work is brilliantly done.
Supernatural horror and suspense that takes place during a real time in history makes for some incredibly interesting reading. Add into this the whole openness of her sexuality that takes place in an era where that wasn’t quite accepted yet and there's this whole range of amazing storytelling aspects in play that you most definitely do NOT want to miss!
About the Creator
Steven Leitman
Just me talking about the comics I enjoy reading, ones that you might not know exist and spotlighting the indie creators that excite me.
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