There are a few things in the comic world that are guaranteed to make a comic fan squeal with excitement. One of them of course is the phrase New Vertigo series.”
Saucer Country is one of four new Vertigo titles rolling out his month, and it does not disappoint.
The primary focus is Arcadia Alvarado, a Hispanic Governor that is running for President and has a past that appears to have cultivated a dreadful fear of aliens. This comic feels like the pilot episode of a television show. It introduces the characters and their motivations, teases the impending alien threat, and features a story structure that is utterly perfect. Paul Cornell wrote this beauty and I can only hope that it runs as long as some Vertigo titles with storytelling this good.
I can already tell that the primary driving force of this series will be the characters, and Cornell certainly makes them all memorable. Though they all have different physical appearances that make them stand out, the voices that he has written for them are all unique and really help cultivate a story with characters that exceed the two dimensions of the page.
As far as the art is concerned, it fits in well to the style of other Vertigo titles. Ryan Kelly provides the pencils for the series, but there is something about the way he draws that makes it both comforting in its normalcy but shocking in the bizarre circumstances of the plot. There is a degree of detail put into the drawings of this that we don’t see often enough and that gets me excited for the future. The way Kelly draws his landscapes and splash pages is pretty breathtaking. He has achieved a level of artistic quality in this first issue that has impressed me on a level that no other series has done in quite some time.
One person in the world of comics that seldom gets enough praise is the colorist, but for this book I must sing the praises of it’s colorist Giulia Brusco. Giulia (the colorist on one of my favorite non-horror comics Scalped) has such a wide variety of pallets in this book it is breathtaking. She truly makes the work come to life.
I usually give a new series a few issues before I decide to add it to my pull list, but Saucer Country has left an impression on me that will make it a must buy for me immediately. It has the perfect blend of story telling and visual accompaniment that makes for a great comic. The story has a grand scale behind it but works in the small details to build us toward that domineering conclusion that I hope will be 60 issues down the road and not twelve.
