Best Shots  11-09-09
By Newsarama’s Best Shots Team, courtesy of ShotgunReviews.com
Your Host: Troy Brownfield. Review by Russell Burlingame
Tracker #1
From: Top Cow
Written by Jonathan Lincoln
Art by Francis Tsai
Review by Russell Burlingame

At first glance, Top Cow’s new miniseries Tracker seems to be that company’s answer to Wolverine (not that they, and everyone else in the industry, haven’t used Logan-like characters before, but this pointy-toothed, wacky-haired feral man seems spot on). Getting inside, though, you’re one splash-page away from realizing that this is not the kind of book that ever could have gotten approved by the Comics Code Authority.

I’m a sucker for this style of art, and Francis Tsai handles it well. One of the weaknesses of many comics painters is to make the faces of anyone in the background so general as to be more or less a blur of flesh-colored something. Not so here; while the main characters would have to walk a mile in someone’s watercolored shoes to be as deliberate and detailed as an Alex Ross painting, the world they inhabit is a lot more real than most comics painters bother with, and the humanity in their expressions helps to make them relatable.


What came as a surprise in this issue is that the hero of the book actually starts out unconscious and piled with a bunch of corpses inside a mangled city bus. A little expository narration reveals that whatever it was that killed all those people was apparently after our hero—his name is Alex—because of something special in his blood. The doctor who’s standing at his bedside is a plant by a secret organization, and after a few heavyhanded hints that his senses are heightened (smelling flowers from across the room, stuff like that), he hands the guy a business card and exits our story—for now—to allow for plot movement.


The book is constantly moving, and while its plot and characters are all fairly stock (he’s discovering his “powers,”whatever they may be, and he’s a cop who keeps proposing to his girlfriend who won’t marry him until he gets that desk job), it’s solid. The fact that he’s a cop gives him opportunity to investigate the bus massacre without creating the suspension-of-disbelief problem that often comes up in these kinds of stories (“Look, I don’t care if you can smell really good and suddenly have the strength to accidentally break an aluminum desk chair—that doesn’t make you a detective”), and the fact that he’s shown “hulking out”—losing control and going into “superhero mode”—on some thugs at the end of the issue goes a long way toward explaining what had earlier been my biggest concern over the writing—that the character just suddenly started leaping out of windows and jumping cars in search of the big bad a few pages before. Given the context that he blacks out, does uncharacteristic things, uses his powers, and then comes back, gives the book more of a werewolf vibe, and restores the “berserker rage” part of the Wolverine archetype that’s been largely ignored in the recent past.