By Dustin Cabeal
The hardest thing to do in a review is not to be mean. Being mean is easy when you don’t like a comic, but it doesn’t inform the reader of the review or help the creator in any way. Not that I’m going to pretend my reviews help creators, but if they get anything out of it, then that’s at least something.
By now you’ve probably figured out that I did not enjoy Boipelo. Aside from having a story told a hundred times before in a hundred better ways, it was bogged down with extensive narration and contained no three-dimensional characters.
The opening page is three paragraphs of information about the world the story takes place in and an extreme close up on someone’s face. I don’t know who the character is or why I’m looking at them since they’re just there to be the sole visual on a wall of text. After that, we meet a scientist that’s a bit of a dick that discovers something in an African tribe’s land. Before and after this we meet a black ops military team and eventually learn that they’re there to wipe out the tribe because that’s what you do when you want to keep a secret and not share profits. One of the soldiers gets left behind and assumed dead; he’s white so there’s a good chance he’s going to save the tribe or something to that extent.
The one saving grace for this comic is that the art is pretty damn good. It’s not perfect; it needs inking, real inking and it would be even better. It’s in all black and white pencils, but it’s begging to be inked and colored. It’s an indie book, so I understand money restraints, but an artist should be told if they’re work is being colored or not so they can adapt their style. While the art is good, it doesn’t use its resources to be better. It doesn’t have to be Frank Miller, black & white, but use what you have to work with. Even with all this said, it’s still really good looking art and the best part of the issue.
There’s nothing new here with the story. It’s been done and better. It’s not that it can’t be done again and again, but you can’t wait until the second issue to truly introduce the main characters and start to develop them. That and the sure amount of back story that’s needed to explain this world killed my interest in it before I even got to experience it. It’s not unreadable, but it’s a rough trip for sure.
Score: 2/5
Boipelo
Writer: Matt Bryce
Artist: Unknown at the time of publishing
Self-Published