Truthful Reviews: Giga #1

   Today's Truthful Review is Vault Comics' Giga #1. Written by Alex Paknadel, illustrated by John LÉ, colored by Rosh and lettered by Aditya Bidikar. The synopsis on Amazon reads. as follows:

Nobody knows why the skyscraper-sized mechs known as ‘Giga’ fought their bitter, centuries’ long war. All they know is that when the fighting finally stopped, the dormant Giga became humanity’s new habitat and new gods in one. When disgraced engineer Evan Calhoun finds an apparently murdered Giga, his society and the fascistic tech-centered religious order that controls it are rapidly thrown into chaos.

Here's what are my thoughts of Giga #1?

   This book is decompressed storytelling at is finest. There's a lot of exposition and character setup, which I can understand being the first issue; but it was a bit too slow for my taste. Granted, it did introduced us to a few character that I'm sure we'll be seeing in the next few issues, it sets up the religious and social structure in this new age and still managed to leave us with many questions yet to be answered; which is what a first issue should do. Honestly, if this book didn't look as great as it does I probably wouldn't want to pick up issue #2, but the art team and the letterer outdid themselves and gave such a particular visual language to this book that, on the strength of their work alone I'll be picking the next issue and probably the next one after that. 

   The art looks stylized, the ranges from somewhat "simple" to absolute brilliance in a matter of a few panels, the color palette feel like Mexican culture; when I saw the Gigas it reminded me of those amazing Mayan temples and Mayan culture, their architecture and their colorful clothing. The art portrays the scope and magnitude of these giant robots in such a cool manner that you can't help but love it! 

   The main character is a Black young man with no legs who moves around in a wheelchair that is literally falling apart. This is great for many reasons, first we have a Black leading character who's extremely intelligent and is a survivor, he's also a great representation of a person with disabilities; that's a beautiful thing. There's also an interesting supporting cast and his sidekick is someone people will like as soon as they meet him/her. ;)

   Like I said, the story is slow; there's a lot of prep work for what's certain to come so if you're expecting to see Mazinger fighting Voltron in the first issue you're going to be disappointed; but I'm sure it's coming. All in all, on a scale from 1 - 10 I give this book a 7; I'm sure once those Gigas start beating the crap out of each other this book will become a favorite of mine. 

As always... keep it Truthful!