Free Comic Book Month "Worlds of Aspen"

So last week was a comic aimed at girls. Well this week let’s look at a free comic book about girls that is aimed at guys. And the comic for this week comes to us from Aspen Comics. According to their website, Aspen Comics was founded by Michael Turner. Michael worked on many different books before, from Witchblade and Tomb Raider to a short run on Superman/Batman. Mostly he does covers for other companies today but still has a role in the company. All that said, the comic is a bit of a mess in the first story, and I am really unsure how I feel about the second. Let’s take a look at World of Aspen.

 The cover is . . . . blah. It shows three random girls in generic poses with what looks like a siren and a muppet ghost behind them. I dunno. The cover just doesn’t do that much to leave an impression on me.

There are two main preview stories in the comic, but on the inside cover it says there are 7 and a pin up. Of course, I’ll be looking at the comics themselves. 

The first story, homecoming, starts with nerd 101 here playing video games after studying on a Saturday night. Get use to the green text bubbles. This whole story is just about all green text bubbles. While the dog plays ball outside in the dark (which seems kinda dumb if you ask me) something catches the dog’s dopy eyes.

An alien teen who just so HAPPENS to be the same age as the nerd falls out of the sky and into his pool. Yeah, don’t you just hate when that happens? Hunter here of course thinks he is being pranked. You know, when I was in school and even in college, the pranks were mostly ones of eggs, dog poop in burning bags, and dumb as rock pranksters. If a hot girl is naked in your pool and you’re a normal (I assume) male human, well, jokes on them. Anyway, he takes the girl inside his house.

As he looks up anything about her on the internet, she attacks him with, wait, is that white lantern powers? What? She demands to know what he is doing in her house and he says that her name is Celeste. It is here that we get a page of back story that I am doing a favor of not showing you. It is a page of text. Half is the green bubble text and the other is a fake alien webpage. There is no character reaction at all to what he tells her either. Anyway, she and her mom were taken by aliens 10 years ago and now she is back.

Nerdlinger here hacks the school system and gets her admitted in with no problem. Oh wow. He is a super hacker with L33T skillz. It is also on this page that we get introduced to the rest of the Breakfast Club. We got the cool girl, the guy who thinks he is awesome and all girls are his, and the nerdy cheerleader.

Let’s look at the problems shale we? First off, cool girl looks like she really doesn’t want to be with them. If she has some image to keep, why is she with them at all? Plus with her colors and hair style, she looks like. . . . Guy. . . . Gardner. Hmmm. Anyway, Paul is a friend I can understand. We all got that one friend who flits with everyone and strikes out a lot. He reminds me of someone from comics as well. . . . . . . . . Hold on a tick. White LANTERN powers, a girl who looks and acts like Green Lantern Guy Gardner, and Paul thinking he is always awesome like HAL JORDEN? Oh geez.

What is it with me and finding Green Lantern stuff in everything I read?! What is my curse?!

Ok, going to overlook that for now. The last is the smart cheerleader. I do not care if she is smart and is trying to make a new arch type. Cheerleaders are a pack group. One does not get to hand out with a group of outcasts. More so if you want to play her up as the only smart one. The others on the squad would want to force her to do their school work OR mock her endlessly just to make them feel better. I had a friend back in my animation college who was a cheerleader and she was the butt of many jokes. At least that is what she told me.

The group of mismatched stereotypes is the only ones homecoming committee when an alien attacks. Great build up there. But wait, it gets better. The alien, of course, is only after Celeste. 

After a short battle, Celeste says she wanted to come to Earth to protect us from the coming alien threat. Wait, I thought she was an Earthling. Was she always an alien or was she an experiment? No. No, going to hold off on my rant until the end. The scout gets back up and call down the ceiling.

As the ceiling falls, Celeste protects our nerd while the others get crushed and die. Huh, that was fast. But instead of staying dead and getting out of this mess of a book, Celeste calls her glowing white spaceship to help save them. Again, rant coming soon. One more page to go.

Celeste puts the friends into a green healing pod and fixes them up with whatever random alien parts she had laying around. Thus is born the defenders of earth and high school.

And now, a rant. Ahem. (Puts on Red Lantern ring)

WHAT THE HECK WAS THIS?! GIRL FALLS OUT OF SKY AND HAS POWERS. COMIC SAYS SHE WAS A HUMAN AND THAT SHE HAS MEMORY LOSS I GUESS, BUT SHE WAS ALWAYS AN ALIEN BUT NEVER KNEW SHE WAS AN ALIEN OR THAT THERE WAS A TIME SHIFT BETWEEN PLANETS OR SOMETHING. THEN THERE ARE THE FRIENDS. WHY? WHY SHOULD WE CARE THEY GOT CRUSHED?! WHO WERE THEY? HOW ARE THEY GOING TO HIDE THOSE NEW ALIEN PARTS? NO, I DO NOT CARE THIS WAS A PREVIEW OR A FREE COMIC. THE WHOLE POINT OF FREE COMIC BOOK DAY IS TO GET YOUR WORK OUT THERE SO OTHER PEOPLE CAN READ AND WANT TO BUY YOUR NORMAL BOOK. THIS STORY JUST MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I PAID TOO MUCH FOR THE FREE COPY.

(Takes ring off)

In short, I had no idea what was going on at any given time. The rules of the story seemed to change from page to page. As a story to get my interested, it failed.

After this story, we just have some 2-page ads and the pin up before we get to the second story in the book, Idolized.

This is an in comic cover of the girl in the supersuit from the cover. Again, this cover tells me nothing with the art. I have no idea who this girl or why I should care. Yes there is a paragraph of text but that is just a cop out. Pretty much, the paragraph is says she is taking part in Superhero Idol so she can get revenge on someone.

The story starts with her on stage. And that is it for this page. That is something I found out about this comic. The panels are very big but not much goes on in most of them.

So Leslie, as we learn her name, walks to the panel of judges and they ask her why she wants to be a superhero. Again, big panels with a whole lot of nothing. 

Leslie says it is for redemption. She says that she screwed up and cost many people their lives. Well that sounds fair enough. She feels guilt at the her inability to stop evil and makes to make up for it. By the way, don’t you just love how panels 1 and 3 add to the story? Seeing the judges with the blankest of expressions really helps move things along.

Finally we get some back story. It talks about how in movies and comic books, heroes and villains seem really cool. But in their version of real life it is anything but. I say their version because I would like to think of this as a worse case as you’ll see in the last page.

We see a huge super fight. Why they are fighting is unknown. Art wise, meh. The characters are so nondescript that I really am not interested at looking at it too long.

So overall, these were not that great at story telling. The art was good enough but art alone can almost never carry a book. The stories need to be fleshed out more in the real comic to really get me interested. As it stands, I don’t know if this is going to do well.

All Images (c) Aspen