Zero, Vol. 1: An Emergency by Ales KotMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
I knew very little about Zero before picking this up, but I'd read the general plot description/summary and the cover made the art look awesome. The story was pretty bland, and the art was generally good with cool moments, but also bland moments. I'm a fan of comics that regularly change artists - it keeps me interested - so long as the art is interesting, and the art here was pretty uninspiring. At times it was even confusing, as there is no real distinctive feature about the main character and so the different art styles made it hard to keep track, and there were fight scenes where it was hard to tell who was actually doing the fighting.
It's pretty obvious that I'm a sci-fi fan, and while this steps into that realm occasionally, it's mostly just a spy/action thriller. For me, those steps were the most interesting part, and both the third and the final issue I got a little more invested and interested in seeing more. But in general, investment was a problem - the main character is one of those typical action hero types - very little emotion, raised to kill and feel nothing, but has some vague feelings for a girl and is a little bit of a rebel. It's not enough to gestate empathy in the reader or to form him as a unique person, so the tragedy he undergoes is unsatisfying.
The occasional philosophical references felt embarrassingly juvenile, because there is little weight to any of them beyond name-dropping and maybe some heavy-handed Big Statements that are supposed to draw a meaningful parallel between the person/situation and the philosophy, but really are just vague statements.
This whole thing felt rather vague and muddled - the story is told through a flashback, but the character telling and the character hearing know most of the relevant framing details so they're left unstated. The reader is supposed to figure them out as we go, but it feels disjointed and many characters are referenced but off-page, so establishing who is who and what relationships people have is like a guessing game. That's not always bad, but for most of the book I was just trying to get grounded and didn't have the resources for emotional investment in the characters. Spoiler: This contributes to how underwhelming the tragic death of one of the characters is - we are supposed to care about her because the main character does - or he might, I guess - though we've seen very little of her or of his emotions.
Maybe it's just not for me, but I'm probably not going to pick up the next one unless it takes a striking turn away from the grimdark-emotionless-action-hero genre.
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