Titan Comics rolls out the b-movie love with It Came! #1. Since It Came! hits shops this week, Titan was kind enough to send an advance copy my way. How did they know to do this? How could they possibly have known that I spent my childhood watching schlock drive-in sci-fi fare on Channel 11 before spending my teens and twenties in a junk-food (among other things) induced haze watching Mystery Science Theater 3000? They’ve got eyes everywhere, those crafty blokes at Titan…but I’m on to them, now.
More importantly, I’m on to It Came! I’m really digging what Dan Boultwood is laying down, here. While this comic is certainly a love letter to the black and white genre flicks of the fifties and early sixties, it’s also a darn good COMIC, utilizing all sorts of visual gags and layouts that could really only work on the printed page. The black and white art is certainly meant to evoke the black and white of the cinema and you can practically hear the tinny organ and theremin music playing in the background throughout. Boultwood is a brilliant cartoonist who captures the era perfectly, but his humor isn’t overly reliant on nostalgia, and instead just hits you with joke after joke.
Ah, the jokes. So, as an American, even with my love of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Fawlty Towers, Terry Pratchett, and even the awful, folky parts of Marc Bolan’s back catalogue, I didn’t get all the jokes. That’s okay. I’m man enough to admit when I’ve been outsmarted. Luckily, my girlfriend, a genuine Brit who I have kept alive in captivity here in the great state of New Jersey, was able to explain some of them to me. They were still funny. While I had a good chuckle as I read through It Came! she, on the other hand, was in near hysterics. Well, you know, in a thoroughly dignified way, of course.
But really, It Came! is quite funny, and it deliberately hits all of the proper cinematic beats in these first twenty-two pages. We’ve got our square-jawed hero and his fetching female companion, the hapless villagers, the authority figures who simply refuse to believe that something extraordinary, dangerous, and extraordinarily dangerous is happening right under their noses…and giant alien robots. Did I mention the giant alien robots? So, not only is It Came!funny and smart, I suspect it will still be funny on the re-read.
If I have a complaint at all, it’s simply that I’m not sure that the serial format is really going to benefit It Came! and perhaps Titan would have been better served by releasing this as one volume instead of in 22 page installments. But really, why complain? Maybe it’s for the best. Perhaps we’re not meant to handle that much hilarity in one sitting. If this is indicative of the level of quality we’ll be getting out of Titan Comics in coming months, then, well, there shall be quality for all!
It Came! hits shops on August 14th so…keep watching the skies!
Story: 7/10
Art: 8/10
Overall: 8/10
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