Code 6 Comics is one of the new imprints being launched by CG Entertainment, the people who brought you CrossGen.  Quite what distinguishes Code 6 books from the rest of the CrossGen line, besides not being the CrossGen universe, I'm not entirely sure.  According to the press release, it's a "friendly home for creator-developed projects that lack the funding for traditional self-publishing."  Except it doesn't seem to be creator-owned.  Anyhow, here's The Crossovers #1, one of their first offerings.

This is one of those high concept offerings that you can easily imagine sounding great at the pitch stage.  The four members of the Crossover family all have secret lives, but in completely different genres.  The father is superhero Archetype, the mother battles vampires, the son's been contacted by aliens, and the daughter has a portal to a swords'n'sorcery fantasy universe in the basement.  As the series progresses, the barriers between the different genres break down and chaos ensues.

It doesn't sound like a bad idea for a series, but it lies very flat on the page.  Writer Robert Rodi has taken a conscious decision to stress the genre elements by making every character as archetypal as possible.  So we have a paranoid UFO obsessive called Perry Noia, a fantasy villain called the Imperatrix Tyranna, and so forth.  Rodi is so busy trying to stress the genres that he's fallen into the obvious trap by making the characters totally generic.

The problem is that the characters Rodi has created aren't archetypes, they're stereotypes.  They're not real characters at all, just a bunch of genre conventions wandering around being deliberately generic in order to play up the gimmick.  To get away with that approach to the concept, the series would have to be very funny indeed, but it isn't.  While it's played tongue in cheek, it's not exactly packed with jokes.  The series seems to want to be taken at least semi-seriously as a story.  And the characters aren't rounded enough for that to work.

Rodi was also responsible for the Vertigo book Codename: Knockout, which I found equally uninspiring.  I recall an introduction which he wrote to that series, explaining that he'd had this great, original idea of doing a lighthearted comedy spin on sixties spy movies.  Since Codename: Knockout came out some time after Austin Powers, this always struck me as overestimating the originality of the premise.  Much the same seems to be happening here, as Rodi's approach seems to be that the interaction of genres is inherently a novel and imaginative idea.

But it isn't.  You can cross these genres and find plenty of past examples.  If you blend horror and sci-fi, you don't get an amusingly novel awkward mess, you get Alien.  Superhero plus alien invasion paranoia equals Rom, among many others.  Fantasy and gothic horror is hardly a difficult pairing to match, and so forth.  Crosspollination between genres has been going on for years, and the hard-and-fast dividing lines that this series takes as its starting point just don't exist any more. 

Mere interaction between genres isn't original enough to carry a series on its own, and Rodi doesn't bring a great deal more to the table.  It's got quite good art by Belgian artist Mauricet and inker Ernie Colon, but that's not very distinctive either - it can't be, really, because it's got to fit with all four genres at once, and the result is art which is attractive, pleasant, but ultimately neutral.

Somewhere in here, there's a good idea for a series - but it's a much broader comedy, and the premise won't hold up to being taken even this seriously.

Rating: C+

back | continue