Finally for this week, another new title from Image.

Small Gods writer Jason Rand clearly subscribes to the traditional view on suspension of disbelief - ask the audience to accept one highly unlikely thing and then go from there.  In this case, the idea is that since 1991, psychic abilities have been officially recognised as existing.  The book is a police procedural, but the psychic powers (in an otherwise completely normal world) are what make it distinctive.

Lead character Owen is precognitive.  Obviously that invites comparisons with Minority Report.  Fortunately, Small Gods sidesteps the rather contrived logical loops of that story, which worked on the premise that people would be arrested and tried for crimes they hadn't in fact committed.  Small Gods takes a much more sensible approach - if you just prevent the guy from committing the crime altogether, he can't be charged with anything, because he hasn't done anything.  What you do is lie in wait, stop the crime in progress, and arrest him for attempt.

This immediately gets the story into my good books because that approach is actually broadly consistent with the theory of inchoate crimes (and avoids all the nonsense about "how do you know the prediction is accurate).  I'm less persuaded by the idea that telepaths would be excluded from the force altogether on the grounds of invasion of privacy; given that the police regularly go in for infiltration and wire-tapping, you'd have thought a more likely solution was to treat telepaths as an investigative tool that needed to be specially authorised for particular jobs.

Nonetheless, that gives us a simple and effective premise, and the police procedural set-up works well within that.  Despite a couple of awkward panels (he seems to struggle particularly with the Jodi character), artist Juan Ferreyra produces largely successful black and white work, with some very nice vision sequences that mess about with the panel layout to good effect.  The back-up strip art by Mahmud Asaar is rougher, but some decent use of light and shade carries it through.

A straightforward concept, credibly done.  Good first issue.

Rating: A-

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