THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE.
by Matthew Amuso. Everyone craves answers, but answers are boring. It’s questions that fascinate us, animate our souls, and propel us through life. Questions, and pretty pictures of things going BOOM. Rick Remender gets that. So Napalm Lullaby #1 doesn’t waste time on exposition. No opening scroll or charts and graphs here. Remender simply drops us into the deep end and lets his Death or Glory collaborator, Bengal, handle the action.
Bengal excels at drawing action. Fights and chases jump across the panels with old-school zeal and clarity. Hell, Bengal excels at many things. He doesn’t just draw these pages; he colors and letters them, imbuing everything with joyful propulsion. Bengal is a Frenchman who loves manga, and in bringing his European and Japanese influences together, he’s synthesized a new iteration of classic American superhero art. The forms and colors say Heavy Metal, the speed lines, facial expressions, and occasional skimping on backgrounds say Shonen Jump, yet the results remind me of Sixties Marvel and DC. This stuff just pops.
Napalm Lullaby is presented as an “apocalyptic superhero story,” though beyond Bengal’s style, its main characters (Sarah and Sam) wearing cool masks, and its violent riff on the Superman origin myth, there are few superheroics in evidence. Not that it matters; the story we get is a weird and wild headrush courtesy of Remender, ever a punk youth at heart. (The writer kicks things off by thumbing his nose at religious fundamentalists; he’s said this is a story about moral authority, and there’s plenty in here to outrage moral authoritarians, including a striptease that can only be described as angelic.)
The set-up: after two country-fried cultists find a baby that seems to hail from, well, somewhere else, the story jumps forward fifty years into a crumbling, theocratic future. When we get there (then?), Remender drops in some of his trademarked narration about the lousy state of everything. His brand of emotive soapboxing isn’t for everyone, and he’s not flexing any new muscles — this spiel could’ve been pulled from a random issue of Deadly Class, another Remender series about chaotic types. But if you’re of a certain cynical yet romantic mindset, Napalm Lullaby will connect because things are terrible. It feels good to hear someone else say it out loud.
What is going on in this world and how it fell into this sorry state, that’s for future issues. (Odds are it has something to do with “The Magnificent Leader,” the ruler of this shantytown hereafter.) And since Sarah and Sam, our masked protagonists, have the power to create realistic hallucinations, we can’t always be sure what’s real and what’s a dream. This creates a sense of surprise that can catch the reader wrongfooted. Without the comforts of context, we can’t predict where things are going, and since bookshelves are currently full of by-the-numbers Chosen One adventures, that’s truly exciting.
Of course, there are drawbacks to this approach. What’s at stake and what motivates Sam and Sarah are still unclear. That ambiguity keeps them at a distance from the reader and leaves the story feeling thin. The first issue of another recent Remender jam, The Sacrificers, is equally short on explanations but spends far more time building its characters, and packs a deeper emotional punch.
Napalm Lullaby #1 is sci-fi action that goes hard and says things that willfully defy those moral authoritarians who claim to have all the answers. It’s a blast to read and pretty to look at, but for now? Its heart is hidden, but as a deliberately provocative work from a provocative creative team, you can hear it beating. If it keeps us asking the right kind of questions, it may beat louder yet.
7.5 / 10
Napalm Butterfly #1 is in stores now. To snag a copy, click this.
Image Comics / $4.99
Written by Rick Remender.
Art by Bengal.
Check out this 3-page preview of Napalm Lullaby, courtesy of Image Comics:
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