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September Is for Comics 03
Centipede #1 (2017), Dynamite/Atari, by Max Bemis and Eoin Marron
A tie-in comic for the classic Centipede video game. Pretty sure I picked this up on the basis of "they made a comic based on the Centipede video game?" while confusing Centipede with Snake, the way I always do. This is probably because I first encountered Snake as the sample game Nibbles in MS-DOS Qbasic on our IBM 186 in the early 90s, and then in the version I hand-coded on my TI-83, and thus it was never called Snake (and was obviously not about a snake, because snakes don't eat fruit, although centipedes are also predators, and now of course I am having all kinds of "Serpent of Eden" thoughts about it. Crowley? Was that you? The amount of time I spent playing with it under my desk in class probably did credit toward Hell. New headcanon: Crowley only owns Nokia phones and never plays any games on it other than Snake.)
Anyway, someone should definitely do a tie-in comic for Snake, it's public domain so you wouldn't even have to buy a licence, you could do really cool things with story and graphics and use of the page and creative interactions of meta and shifting POV.
This does not do that.
There's a section in the back about how someone suggested to the author that he could do a comic about the square-jawed-yet-geeky last survivor of a planet that has been destroyed by a monster apocalypse as he goes out on a quest for revenge, and the author thought, wow, what am amazing and original idea! which just goes to show that the people involved in this comic have had a very different experience of stories than I have.
It's... fine? If you have an emotional attachment to the game Centipede to the same level that I do Snake you might like it, but all shoot 'em ups since Space Invaders have left me cold (Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett is one of several Space Invaders-based novels, you should read it if that's what you're looking for.)
Anyway has exactly the style of art you'd expect from that synopsis. The closest thing it does to having fun playing with meta is having the main character be a non-Earth person who's a specialist in Earth pop culture, solely so he can make pop culture references that the audience will pick up on. It's explicitly based on the Hero's Journey, and remind me to make a meta post about Good Omens and the Hero's Journey some day, but basically I am so beyond done with Campbell other than that, so that didn't help either. There are no badly done female characters to annoy me so far because so far there's only the one dude. I was pretty comprehensively bored. But if you like that sort of thing you might like this thing, there's nothing actively wrong with it.
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It certainly plays into "I can be important" and "I've learned something." Also, Earth is wacky and its people can be lured into skillsets.
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(fond memories of watching that film with a bunch of space nerds, one of whom was also called Alex)
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I'm intrigued.