The Image superhero line continues.  But whereas most of the other books have been very obviously superhero titles, and if anything have leaned too far towards the genre conventions in terms of their style and appearance, Clockmaker goes in quite the opposite direction.  If Image hadn't advertised it as a superhero title, I'd certainly never have picked up on the fact from issue #1.

Clockmaker is a Jim Krueger concept that's been doing the rounds for a while now - two years ago, WildStorm were meant to be publishing it, back when it was called Heaven's Clock.  The concept is, and I quote from the solicitations, that "Hidden within a hollow mountain in Switzerland is a giant clockworks [sic].  Hundreds of men that never age maintain the old behemoth's operation.  The clock is the cause and sustainer of the Earth's revolution.  And more, it is the gateway to Heaven itself."

It is handy that this useful summary appeared in the Previews solicitation, since aside from the fact that there's a giant clock hidden in a Swiss mountain, none of it's in issue #1.  That makes for a rather strange read if you haven't picked up the premise from promotional materials.

Part of that's due to the unusual format of the issue.  The pages are double-sized.  Normally this sort of tabloid format struggles to make the shelves in the direct market.  Clockmaker's solution to that problem is that it's designed to be folded in half and racked as an ordinary comic.  (Now that'll annoy the "near mint" brigade.)  But in order to keep it at the same price, that means it's half the number of pages at twice the size.

You can decide for yourself whether you want to view this as a twelve page story at a full price, or as a normal length story in an unusual format.  It does have some double splash pages, which are designed to show off the scale of the clock.  But you can do scale (in the sense of the scale of the things being depicted) without large pages; it strikes me that the best use of larger pages is to do more panels to a page, allowing types of storytelling and panel layout that can't physically fit onto a normal size page.  I'm not convinced that this book is making the best use of the space made available by its format.  It could very easily be twelve pages of a normal US comic, blown up in size.  And that makes me, personally, incline to the "twelve pages at full price" viewpoint.

Plus, given that the story doesn't even get on to establishing key points of its own premise in the first issue, this was probably not the best time to give over five pages to design sketches, however nice they may be.  The space might have been rather better deployed in extending the page count to 17 and actually explaining the concept.

The book also loses points for some dodgy proofreading.  Missing punctuation marks abound, and the "your/you're" error occurs twice in one scene.  Way too many books outside the Big Two publishers seem to think that punctuation is an optional extra.  It isn't.  Aside from making the book look shoddy and amateurish, it also throws readers off when they're trying to read the dialogue and need to double-take on realising that it just doesn't make sense as written.

Since the story barely gets going, it's hard to rate it effectively, save to note that it has an interesting and unusual design for the giant clock, and a questionable sense of pacing.  I don't want to give a bad review to a series which is clearly trying to do something unusual and different within the genre, but taken as an issue in its own right, this doesn't get far enough into the story to draw me in.

Rating: B-

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