Comic Review: War Heroes # 1

Mark Millar is everywhere right now, honest to God everywhere. After a period off with illness he came back with Marvel's Civil War and now he's just gone insane. At the last count he was writing half of Marvel's books,Wanted is doing silly things at the box office and all the cool kids will tell you that Kick-Ass is what you really should be reading right now so you can look all good and groovy when the movie comes out in a year or so.

Not content with the aforementioned heroic duties being performed at Marvel, as if he has to make up all at once for his absence, he is now reaching out into non-Marvel creator owned stuff. OK, Kick-Ass was that as well but Icon is owned by Marvel so I'll let it pass. So now, along with Tony Harris on pencils, we have War Heroes, which Millar claims is "what my Ultimates 3 would have been if Bryan and I had stuck around", something that a good many people would love to wake up one day and find out had actually happened.

The first issue of War Heroes flies along at a mad pace, getting the background story out of the way so as to get to the main premise of the book in the shortest possible time. Without wanting to give too much away, the book follows a not too far-fetched idea of how the future War on Terror could progress, mixing in a few ideas from New Labour's New Britain. From that we enter true comic book territory whilst still retaining the smallest amount of possibility. This could happen, I guess.

It is always hard to assess a completely new book from a single issue when clearly so much is going to be set up and introduction of characters, but this one is definitely showing a lot of potential. It remains to see if the frenetic pace will be kept up in future issues, but for now this is definitely one to watch and, if you want to be cooler than the cool kids, to start bigging up now as it seems everything Millar writes these days is Hollywood bound.

M Panda