In "Reason to Get Excited," I spotlight things from modern comics that I think are worth getting excited about. I mean stuff more specific than "this comic is good," ya know? More like a specific bit from a writer or artist that impressed me.
Today, we look at how Michel Fiffe's willing to bank on readers of Copra to either already be fans or be willing to bear with his awesomeness and pick it up from there.
When Fiffe last left off his independent series, Copra, in 2017, it was with a cliffhanger. Now, after putting the entire series until this point into a series of new Image Comics trade paperbacks, Fiffe debuts Copra #1 from Image...which is really just Copra #32, including resolving a cliffhanger from over two years earlier!
The amazing thing, though, is that, as you can tell from the pages above, it is not like you can't understand what is going on in the story, right? One of the only things that you can't follow with comics, in general, is when you don't know the names of the characters and Fiffe takes care of that stuff with quick name tag captions.
Fiffe's a student of comic book history and he knows that, for generations, it would be weird for a new reader to ever pick up a story ON the first issue of a given comic book series. It was much more likely that you were going to start your comic book reading on a larger issue that was part of a long-running series. In fact, in the old days, DC Comics specifically tried to HIDE the fact that a book was a number one because they felt that people would feel that it was untested if it was so low-numbered (it is the same reason why most of the major relaunches of the 1950s and 1960s involved renumbering titles, like Flash taking over the numbering of Flash Comics, Thor taking over Journey Into Mystery, etc.
So Fiffe is just following in the footsteps of generations of comic books that expected any issue to be the point where you could jump on, even if it was in the middle of a narrative and that is certainly the case here.
However, while you are better off knowing the history of the Copra characters, it really doesn't matter as much as the adventure in this given issue and, of course, that strikingly powerful Fiffe artwork (with his beautiful colors, as well).
I'll be frank, I just wanted to show you the opening of Copra #1 to assuage anyone who was afraid of it not making any sense. It totally does, right? Even if you don't know the particulars, you can easily pick up the plot and if you can tell so by those pages above, then you really should be reading Copra. It is balls to the wall over the top action with heart, to boot!
Okay, this feature is a bit less of a reader-interactive one, as I'm just spotlight stuff in modern comics that specifically impressed ME, but heck, if you'd like to send in some suggestions anyways, maybe you and I have the same taste! It's certainly not improbably that something you found cool would be something that I found cool, too, so feel free to send ideas to me at brianc@cbr.com!