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Buy City of Dust #1C comic book 

Steve Niles is well known as the writer who brought horror elements into comic arena, and I agree with the statement after reading his widely publicisized 30 Days of Night although some claimed that Niles has his fair share of misses. Interestingly, this third title produced by the multi-media - Radical Comics, is another impressive debut in both story and art. Radical Comics had previously published Caliber (Sam Sarkar & Garrie Gastonny) and Hercules (Steve Moore & Admira Wijaya).

Steve Niles’s Magic Dust through Philip Krome!

The plot takes place in a Bradburian nightmare surroundings where books are outlawed along with all form of creative thought. A world not that different from today where art programs are disappearing with more frequency from schools and corruption within the church casts a deep destruction on today’s society. Phillip Khrome is Niles’s hard nosed detective for the story’s main player. He’s a guy plagued by guilt from his childhood when he told his teacher about a bedtime story of his father.  Amazingly, it caused swift action which ultimately disallowed Khrome from meeting his father again. Now Khrome tracks offenders of the crime his father was accused of; arresting people for praying, reading, or using their right brain at all.

 

Setting this story in the future environment opens up all ways of possibility for Niles to venture through. The fusion of horror and noir elements that placed in a futuristic surroundings is the one expected from Steve Niles. There’s an especially effective scene in issue one that tells a lot about the environment. The storyline is placed in where Khrome’s literal-minded tech-bots come across a dead body that deflect all types of forensic detection. Khrome is forced to think outside the freaking mind-isolated society that has built around everyone as well in order to tackle the case. The mystery has only begun. But as Khrome finds a book of monsters, it appears Niles is going to demonstrate that a literal world overlooks a lot of important and dangerous things.

The art by Zid or his real name as Mohammad Yazid Kamal Bahrain is simply well done. He paints what he pencilled which makes his artworks well illustrated. The panels are angular and varied, given that Zid is purely art-directed instead of discretely storyline-oriented. This 24-year old bloke of MARA University of Technology (UiTM) had given his best shot for the golden opportunity to work with Niles.

Khrome is another interesting character by Niles, who is fast becoming one of the lead noir writers as well, as seen in Criminal Macabre of Dark Horse Comics and Dead She Said of IDW Publishing. Here, Niles puts a new interesting spin on the detective genre of science fiction.

Buy City of Dust #1D comic book

This comic proves that Niles’s strength lies outside of the mainstream as well. He’s treading through familiar territory with the detective noir and the horror, but putting a fresh new spin on it by plopping it firmly into sci fi territory. I wonder how futuristic the classic monsters would be and what kind of bumps Phillip Khrome would encounter under Niles’s idea commands.

Buy City of Dust #1E comic book

Tags: City of Dust, Steve Niles, Zid

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Radical Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.