Savage #1

Savage #1

Valiant Entertainment 2021

Written by Max Bemis

Illustrated by Nathan Stockman

Coloured by Triona Farrell

Lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Teenage heartthrob. Feral social icon. Dinosaur hunter? Born and raised on an uncharted island full of prehistoric dangers, Kevin Sauvage has a taste of home when a mutant dino threat invades England!

I love Max, I really do. I wasn’t sure what to expect out of this but it certainly wasn’t anything remotely close to this. Now I am not entirely sure that Kevin wouldn’t be better suited in the Faraway but that’s not my choice to make and the one that has is fantastic. Seeing Kevin with his brother Henry is an interesting take on this and I have to say for someone who’s lived away from society for fifteen years Kevin really understands people and human nature. So far the only thing about Henry that I like is that he calls Kevin out on not showering. I mean I get it jungle boy doesn’t bathe but that’s not really an excuse he should’ve bathed on his Island. Regardless of that the fact I am mentioning it at all showcases how in the span of so few pages how invested and involved I am in this story.

I love, love the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented extremely well. I also like how we see his life here versus there and the differences as he sees them. With the character development that we see it’s easy to understand how being lost for the first fifteen years of your life is able to change how you see the world once you are reintroduced to it. With every page I begin to like Kevin more and more. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing the story and the world he now lives in is extremely fun.

I think that the way we see this being structured and how the layers within the story work to weave different aspects into this story is sensational. I mean some of these are pure fun/funny and others have threads that can lead to other places. I like seeing how everything works together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as it creates this smooth reading experience through it’s pages.

The interiors here are nice. I wasn’t quite expecting such a pure comic book style so that was a surprise to me, a good one mind you. What I do love to see is the attention to detail we get from how the linework and it’s varying weights are being utilised. Also I am impressed with the way backgrounds are being utilised and how they fit within the composition of panels so they bring us depth perception, sense of scale and that overall sense of size and scope to the story. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a sensational eye for storytelling. The colour work is magnificent as well. I like the choice of colours and how we see the various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading highlights and shadow work. I’m also impressed with the way that colour is being utilised to define musculature as well.

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Yeah this is a bit silly towards the end on but that’s okay. These are obviously not the same creatures that came from his Island reality and that we see how they arrive well that leads into the final page, a really good cliffhanger! So now I’m not sure this Valiant Universe proper still and I hope it’s not and that Kevin gets the chance to be the hero the world needs and that his new nemesis, which I’m guessing will be these folks, will meet time and time again.