Nowhere Men #1

Nowhere Men #1

W: Eric Stephenson

P: Nate Bellegarde

C: Jordie Bellaire

I love #1 issues. They open up with such promise and possibility. Each opened page could lead to the next book that I will love. Another thing that is great about #1 issues, especially for an unemployed vagrant such as myself, is a lot of them are free if you catch it at the right time on the Comixology show. The comic industry has learned a lot from the narcotics trade. If you are willing to give the consumer that first taste for free, and provide them with a quality product, you will have them hooked and wanting to spend more money on subsequent issues. This is especially true for books like Nowhere Men, which has a relatively unknown creative team (despite Stephenson having worked on many popular image books, and himself is a big wig at the company) and a fresh idea.

Nowhere Men starts out with a flashback set up years in the past. We see four brilliant scientist coming together to present an idea to a global organization. Flashback can be overused in comics. They can drag on for pages and really hinder a story. This is not one of those flashbacks. This last about 4 pages, shows one simple scene, and is just enough to let you know the personalities of the main characters in the book. The other great thing this book does is after a who's who style page right after to truly catch the reader up. 

The story then fast forwards. The Nowhere men are now the head of a corporation. There is a rift and the age old debate on whether scientific advances should be done for profit or simply for the good of man.  Simon, the leader, believes the profit will bring them forward to more advancements, but not everyone on the team agrees. 

We then meet the team being funded by the Nowhere Men. They have issues and seem to all be infected with some horrible pathogen out of every science fiction nightmare. I would think that future issues will jump between stories of the nowhere men that are funding the exploration, and the infected that were being funded. 

I thought this book was extremely well done, and if I had the money I would love to continue reading it. It does seem that this book suffers from a lot of the same things that most image books suffer from, horrible delays. This issue was released in November of last year and the next issue is not supposed to be out until July. I will definitely be looking for a comixology le on this though as I thoroughly enjoyed it.