COPRA #1: Raging Wrath

I went into reading COPRA #1 not knowing what to expect. I knew that Michel Fiffe had created a Suicide Squad fan comic called Death Zone, and I was aware from the preview pages that COPRA was an original creation that was in the same vein as Suicide Squad. Beyond that, I really didn't know what I was getting into when I read my copy of COPRA #1, a monthly comic written, illustrated, produced, and distributed by Michel Fiffe. What I found is one of the most enjoyable first issues that I've read in a long time. COPRA is a sci-fi psychedelic mind bender of a superhero action comic...it's got intense, expertly orchestrated fight scenes and reality warping craziness, but it's also got characters that are interesting and I legitimately cared about them when Fiffe made it clear that everyone in COPRA is expendable.  

COPRA #1 opens on the titular team being deployed on just another of what we assume are countless missions that they've dealt with before. From the first panel, I was struck by Fiffe's ability to use sequential storytelling to convey ideas efficiently. We see in the first panel a silent establishing shot that makes heavy use of negative space, and your eye is drawn to the right of the image where we see a smoking and destroyed building that pulls you into the story immediately with the question of what happened there. We learn in the following panels that the leader, "Man-Head", is the cousin of someone who lives in this unnamed, presumably foreign city, and that he has been sent here with a team to deal with whatever strange phenomena blew up that building.

Fiffe then introduces us to COPRA, and the premise of the series. The idea of the comic is similar to Suicide Squad, and the so far unseen narrator describes COPRA as a collection of, "the dangerous and the hostile" who go on "black ops outings". Right off the bat, the narrator makes it clear that the team as we see it now is not a permanent fixture, and "some died, some stuck around"...none of these characters are guaranteed to survive this mission, and this makes the stakes of the narrative a bit higher. Fiffe does a great job here of succinctly describing COPRA with great tag lines like, "The throwaways had dirty work to do," and "They've humbly described themselves as the wrath of god by way of loser assassins." 

Fiffe then gets into introducing us to each member of the team through an engaging conversation between the characters. One of the strongest points of this comic is that the members of COPRA are not only appealingly weird (they look like they could be straight out of the Doom Patrol reserves), but they talk like real people. They're also pretty much all original characters except for Lite who is an obvious parody of Dr. Light. In one page, Fiffe concisely acquaints the reader with almost the entire team in just four panels through the narrator's descriptions and their pre-battle bickering with each other. 

Lite is the only character who doesn't feel comfortable with some small talk before the mission...the captions describe him as a "neurotic crybaby despite a power suit", and he's the only character who is paranoid about the weird skull with a strange, lightning bolt shaped object sticking out of it. This skull, also on the striking cover of the comic, is just sitting in the back of the van with the team, and Lite points out that they could all be getting radiation poisoning from the crazy thing. We see in the above page that Fiffe has a tight shot on the skull that parallels the following tight shot on Man-Head, which foreshadows the thing's importance and instills a sense of dread in the reader. We also learn in this page that this is an "unauthorized mission", a piece of information that Fiffe drops at exactly the right moment, right before everything goes to hell.

COPRA is confronted by another elite, superpowered team who want the skull-bolt, and "Marty", who was just talking to Man-Head seconds earlier about how his kids have stopped laughing at his jokes, is impaled. Fiffe then gets into 7 solid pages of some of the most amazing superhuman action I've seen in comics in a while. Fiffe's style is extremely kinetic and he conveys a sense of movement that just leaps at you through the page. This sequence is also hyper violent and in the first few panels the neurotic Lite is killed with a machete, following through on the Fiffe's implied promise in the beginning of the book that none of the members of COPRA are safe from death. Almost no words at all are used in this sequence as utter chaos erupts and superhuman soldiers spring into action. 

Fiffe has a dynamic style, and his splatters of paint and scratchy black inks are perfect for this kind of relentless action. His panel lay outs also greatly serve to enhance this action scene, and he ends the sequence of mostly wide panels with a two pages of a 12 panel grid. This is where this brutal action scene moved into the next level for me...we see that two members of COPRA, "a couple: sniper & brawler", are confronted by the leader of the enemy team "Vitas", who used to be with COPRA.

It's not really necessary to totally spoil what happens here, but use your imagination...there's a genuinely heart breaking set of panels where the hyper violence of the scene is halted for a brief moment to focus on this couple and what happens to them. Here, Fiffe takes this 7 page sequence of kinetic, fast paced, gruesome action and turns something that could be gratuitous into something that connects with the reader on an emotional level. These aren't just action figures banging against each other...Fiffe gives you the sense that the stakes are real for these characters, and his hyper violence comes with hyper tragedy as well.

COPRA #1 is a stellar first issue that establishes the premise of the series, the main obstacle for these characters, and the new situation that the team has to handle. The art is a really beautiful mixture of a feeling of homemade, DIY aesthetic that seems like Fiffe did it all with colored pencils, and a refined, professional look. The presentation of the comic itself, such as the highly stylized cover and inside cover, the nice paper quality, the letter from the creator on the inside back cover, is extremely professional in the way that it's been produced. Fiffe has also created trailers for the first and second issue of the series that are very cool.

Of course, this is all icing on the cake of Fiffe's compelling, action packed story with weird and interesting characters, but it was a major selling point for me when I subscribed to the next 11 issues of this series. What I find so amazing about COPRA is that it's a comic completely written, illustrated, and produced by one person and there is a concrete goal of putting an issue of the series out once a month. That's an ambitious and difficult project for one person to manage, and I enjoyed the first issue so much that I'm on board to support it. You should be too...check out COPRA #1, and the second issue is out now.

Digital Pulp: Deep Dive Daredevils

"Some call them pirates, some call them heroes, but none dare call them cowards! In all of nautical legend, never before have such strange and courageous figures come together to unravel the incredible mysteries lurking in the inky ocean depths. If the heading be danger, make way for the DEEP DIVE DAREDEVILS!"

There's a contradiction at the heart of Deep Dive Daredevils.  It's a tribute to pulp adventure comics, a genre named after the cheap pulp paper it was printed on, yet it's published online and is unavailable in print.  Deep Dive Daredevils is digital pulp, a new kind of pulp that has transcended the limitations of paper publication and made the jump to purely online distribution while celebrating the core elements of the genre.  Deep Dive Daredevils is a strange concoction of time travel, cyborg submarine captains, and shamanistic magic, and it's released on the web, one page at a time, on a weekly basis.  

Writers Matt Heistand, Dan Fifield, and Evin Dempsey, who make up the writers collective known as The ThreeOneFive, begin Deep Dive Daredevils with a pirate ship sailing the Arctic Ocean in 1851.  I was immediately struck by Danilo Guida's art style on this first page.  Guida portrays the Aurora Borealis beautifully with modern coloring techniques, but his penciling and inking has a rough, old school look to it.  The page itself has been modified to look aged and faded, as if Deep Dive Daredevils is an artifact salvaged from the pulp era of comics that has been scanned and uploaded to the internet.  

(UPDATE:  Danilo Guida contacted me to let me know that the aging of the pages was done by Fonografiks, the letterer of Deep Dive Daredevils.)

The Aurora Borealis mysteriously strikes at the pirate ship and sinks it, and we then cut to 1937.  The Custer, a submarine, is traversing the very same waters that the pirate ship sank below in 1851.  Joe, a young boy with an eyepatch, and Cup, his three legged dog who also wears an eye patch, spot a man out on the glaciers.  Joe rescues the man and brings him aboard The Custer where Dr. Eugene McCarver cares for him.  The man is Captain Ulysses Armstrong, and he doesn't seem to have any idea how he got here.  

The strength of Deep Dive Daredevil's narrative lies in its escalation of shocking reveals that make you reevaluate what's happening in the comic.  This is a smart way of structuring a comic that's published one page per week because the frequent, mind blowing reveals keep you on the edge of your seat for the next week's installment.  So, at this point, I'm just going to go ahead and suggest that you read the comic before continuing because we're about to enter pretty spoilery waters.

The plot explodes into madness from this starting point as the time displaced Armstrong is transformed by the odd Aurora Borealis energy (which may in fact not be related to the Aurora Borealis at all), and he begins to mutate into a sperm whale.  Guida's full page spread of Armstrong clawing at his face as beautifully colored energy streams into his eye sockets is stunning.  Armstrong is rapidly expanding into a massive sperm whale inside of the confined space of the submarine while Joe, McCarver, and the other crew members struggle to get him to the shuttle bay.  The mysterious Captain of The Custer is barking orders to them throughout this sequence over the intercoms in intervals of "bztk" noises.  

This scene is built on the pretty solid foundation of the visual weirdness of a man morphing into a whale, but the ThreeOneFive hivemind make it something more than mere spectacle.  The rapidly expanding Armstrong gives the scene a ticking clock, a narrative deadline that forces the crew of The Custer to eject the creature before it destroys their vessel and them along with it.  The ThreeOneFive also make the crew humorous and relatable characters rather than just chess pieces to move around Whale Armstrong (Whalestrong?), and they tell a dirty joke that flies over the head of the young, eyepatched Joe.  Joe rushes into danger to fix the jammed bay doors and is sucked into the ocean along with Whalestrong, and this elevates the stakes of the narrative while simultaneously resolving the problem of the expanding whale.

While Cup swims after his master Joe, McCarver runs to the bridge where the as of yet unseen Captain has been incapacitated by the traumatic damage to the ship.  The ThreeOneFive structure this scene in a brilliant way; this week's page ends with Joe lost under the Arctic waves and McCarver dramatically facing the door to the bridge where, "Captain Custer's terrible secret waits beyond this door".  They even make their intentions to leave you desperate for the next week's page explicit in the caption, "Hold thy breath, constant reader".  

Of course, beyond that door, the comic's next mind blowing and game changing reveal awaits.  A full page spread shows us that the captain of this vessel is a legless cyborg plugged into the systems of the submarine! Guida's art here is just amazing, and the ThreeOneFive's captions summarize the captain's condition in a concise and compelling way, "Long ago, after unspeakable tragedy, Doctor McCarver cobbled together  man and ship...once done, this strange symbiosis could never be undone, and neither could function without the other."  Once you get past the surface level of the sci-fi image assaulting your senses, you realize that the ThreeOneFive have crafted a mythic character here.  Captain Custer is one with his ship, and "neither could function without the other".  This is a literalization of the mythic idea of a captain's bond with his ship, and it's really quite a poetic concept in addition to being a nice heaping of sci-fi awesomeness.

McCarver manages to "reboot" Custer just in time for the cyborg captain to belay his order to abandon ship.  The ThreeOneFive deliver on the promise of a cyborg submarine captain by writing him full of fire and passion and humanity despite his mostly mechanical body, and he rallys the crew with a fiery speech.  Meanwhile, Whalestrong is assaulting the ship as it crackles with unearthly, purple lightning.  Guida shines again here with this illustration, and the color of the purple, mystical energy really pops in contrast with the faded colors that he uses to give the rest of the page an artificially aged look.  

This is only 21 pages into the 32 page comic...there's still deals with Shaman representatives of local Sea Goddesses, vengeful animal spirits, time travelling, and mystical trials to come in that eleven page gap.  Deep Dive Daredevils is a comic that is jam packed with sci-fi craziness.  It's a comic that embraces its weekly format by giving the reader enough thrills, excitement, and mind bending reveals to keep them coming back every seven days for the latest page.  

It's also an homage to a genre of pulp adventures from a bygone era, but Deep Dive Daredevils is published on the screen rather than the cheap, poor quality paper of the original pulps.  It retains the familiar aspects of pulp stories while it capitalizes on the advanced coloring and production techniques available to modern artists.  Still, despite it's online nature, the beauty of the comic is that it's created to appear aged in such a way that the reader is given a pulp experience, as if they've stumbled upon this forgotten gem in a dusty attic.  Deep Dive Daredevils is digital pulp, and I'm looking forward to where the ThreeOneFive steer this crazy ride of a comic in the future.