Dominion is the last of the Image superhero books to be launched, and it seems that so far the line can be split into two camps.  There's three relatively conventional superhero books - Firebreather, Venture and Invincible.  And then there's two which are only barely within the genre at all - Clockmaker and this one.

Keith Giffen can usually be relied on to come up with something off the beaten track, even if it isn't necessarily going to work.  This is no exception - it's essentially an alien invasion story, but largely from the perspective of the invaders.  There are no superheroes in this superhero comic.  Instead, the story involves a viral infection landing in Australia, and beginning to turn various Australians into virus-infected superhumans.  They promptly declare themselves to be the new government of Australia, the Dominion.

The story jumps around all over the place, and actually extracting that concept from the first issue takes a bit of work.  To be honest, I had to go off and read a couple of interviews to double check that I'd got it more or less right.  The information's mostly there, but it's hardly laid out in the most accessible way.  When you're doing monthly serialisation, it's generally a bright move to at least establish the concept clearly in the first issue.  Granted, that's a commercial motivation, but I'm not sure what the issue is really gaining in artistic terms by being oblique about the plot.  The key missing link is that the issue never really establishes that the various superhumans are in any kind of alliance, and which ones are actually involved in the Dominion government.

The idea is interesting - once you work out what it is - but the book is hard work, and by all appearances it's harder work than it needs to be.  Nor are the superhumans particularly compelling characters.  For the most part, they meander around being bitchy to one another, but there's no real reason to care about their squabbles.

I'm resisting the temptation to give the book a good review simply for being different, because on balance I think it's shot itself in the foot by being so oblique.  I'll give it a couple of issues to see how it settles down, since I do like the idea.  But it doesn't draw me into the characters, and there's no point writing a story that's hard to follow if that doesn't give you a powerful upside elsewhere.  Honestly, I can't spot one here, and that leaves it as a badly told story, and a backfired experiment.

Rating: C+

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