Ordinary #1
Publisher: TITAN
Writer: Rob Williams
Artist: D’Israeli
What would happen if, one day, the entire world developed superpowers? Some incident occurred that mutated everyone on Earth into beings with a single, almost overwhelming ability? What if your best friend suddenly mutated into a bear, for example? And finally, what if you were the only person unaffected by all this?
Meet Mike. He’s a balding, bearded, middle-aged plumber-cum-slacker, divorced with a kid he hardly ever sees, just kinda skiving his way to the grave. So when New York is randomly overcome with mutants and he seems to be the only one still normal (or as normal as it gets in NYC), what could he possibly do? Well, I mean after trying to get drunk…
Ordinary is the latest offering from Rob Williams, creator of 2000AD’s The Ten Seconders. Here he teams with artist D’Israeli (Scarlet Traces, War of the Worlds) to present the tale of an everyman caught up in incredible events with no idea of how to react. Michael is seen to be in real danger, not only from the chaos around him but from everyday troubles. For example, who would want to have to deal with their loan shark on a normal day, let alone on this one?
The artwork is easily as good as the storytelling, in fact it takes at least two read-throughs to pick up on all the little background Easter Eggs that D’Israeli has dropped in. If anything is wrong with issue 1, it’s my usual gripe about the structuring of a lot of comics in the last few years: that the book is written not as a self-contained comic with a cliffhanger leading into issue 2 but as the first few pages of a graphic novel. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the story so far and I’m looking forward to issue 2.
4 out of 5 nerds
Dave Bowling
Dave was born at an early age to parents of both sexes. He has been a self-confessed geek for as long as he can remember, having been raised through the 80s on a steady diet of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Red Dwarf and (sigh) Knight Rider. Throw the usual assortment of Saturday morning cartoons into the mix and we have something quite exceptional: someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of utter tosh; a love of giant robots and spaceships fighting; and the strange desire to leap tall buildings in a single bound while wearing his underpants over his trousers. The death ray is currently in the works and one day you shall all bow to him, his giant space station and fleet of funky orange space shuttles...
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