Review by C.J. Bunce
TKO Studios is the new comic book publisher that surprised the industry early this year with an entirely new way to entertain readers. They release four books at once in a binge format paralleling Netflix TV streaming shows, and they offer each story available in a trade paperback edition and as six separate comic book issues in a boxed set. Readers buy whichever format appeals to them. The last positive is the publisher’s slightly oversized format, a size that allows more artwork space per page while still feeling like a comic book. But this is all formatting. The substance doesn’t pull any punches, with TKO bringing in some familiar, beloved writers and artists for their first round (check out our reviews of those series linked below). So does the second round measure up to the first? It was worth the wait, and fans will be pleased.
We’ll begin with Eve of Destruction, a zombie survival story in the vein of The Walking Dead, but mixing in several other influences and concepts along the way. The story is written by TKO’s CEO and co-publisher Salvatore A. Simeone and Steve Simeone, with lettering by Ariana Maher. The heavy lifting comes from artists Nik Virella, Isaac Goodhart, and Ruth Redmond who fill six issues with non-stop action. And if you’re a fan of John Carpenter’s The Thing, you might agree the creatures have more than a little in common with that horror film.
On the night of an important school dance, a girl’s separated parents, both women, are feuding over how each is contributing to the parenting the girl. A hurricane is closing in off the coast, and with it comes a change in biology fueled by changes in the Earth’s environmental conditions that are triggered by this new storm. The nature of the threat is specific and unusual–it is only targeting men and boys, and the results are on track to produce a kind of extinction forecasted in the title. Although it could be a story about feminism, it doesn’t have any time to even broach the ramifications of this threat. This is a story about survival in the first hour of a disaster.
