This is the first work I’ve seen from Marco Ferrari outside of his breathtaking commission work, and wow, guy’s really firing on all cylinders. I was pretty stunned to realize he’s doing both inks and colors for the book, and even more impressed when I realized he essentially pivoted his whole style to manage it.
Ferrari’s black & white work feels incredibly complete. He combines a sophisticated use of screentones with expressive hatching & texture work, leading to pieces with striking value compositions. I could imagine adding flats to these pieces, maybe, just to add some warmth, but there’s really no need – his illustrations wouldn’t look out of place next to pages from classic manga greats.
For Frontiersman, though, he seems to take a different approach to the inks knowing he’ll be coloring them. The hatching and texture is still there, but it’s often saved for background elements more than characters; this makes all of the environments feel very full and considered. Meanwhile, character’s faces are inked incredibly simply… so that he can add all the planing and detail in the color pass. That’s some real smarter-not-harder shit.
Then when we get to the palettes? It’s just a flex. Frontiersman particularly, given that the majority of it is set out-of-doors, features numerous spreads that transition, panel over panel, through the duration of a sunset or sunrise, the light dappling all the characters in its gorgeous glow.
I was initially less enthused about the art in Antioch. It feels a bit looser right from the jump, and despite a host of fun background characters and some interesting architectural designs (the facility exterior is quite cool, for example) the prison setting is inherently a little dull. Surprisingly, though, I found that the art got better as the run went on – somewhat of a rarity for comics generally, but especially comics with delays / scheduling woes like Antioch had. In particular, there’s some combat splash pages toward the end that are out of this world.
shout-out to this fun graph-paper trick Ferrari used to show the ineffable, eldritch nature of Klara’s powers
The world of Frontiersman is a lot of fun. I love the idea of not just superheroes that have retired or moved on, but supervillains that have done the same. I feel like a lot of the time, superheroes are presented as being more… societally normative? As if they’re just rational actors clocking in every day for a super-career, so it’s only natural that they might start a family and call it a day at some point. Meanwhile, supervillains tend to be painted with a more unstable brush: mental illness, megalomania, radicalized devotion. You’re not gonna see the Joker do a career pivot into IT, y’know? So it’s a fun touch that many of Frontiersman’s supervillains were really more like super-powered petty criminals, folks who were just in it for economic reasons. It stands to reason they could change after a decade of reflection, right?
There’s a lot of great character concepts here too, both the designs / powers and the historical relationships they all have with each other. It’s refreshing to read a superhero story where the characters have baggage for narrative reasons and not because the writer is being forced to grapple with five decades of lore bibles & toxic fandom. My favorite was probably Galaxie – at first a more lighthearted take on the Dr. Manhattan-style “why would an omnipotent being care enough about humanity to do good or bad” concept, but then we find out he just wants his former superhero fling to have a part in the life of his child… and that child is uh, a burgeoning solar system developing in the microcosmic galaxy that makes up his body? Good stuff.
After such a strong first outing, I was a little disappointed in the writing of Antioch. The elevator pitch of “supervillain jailbreak” is fun, but I felt it was lacking a lot of the interiority that made Frontiersman so compelling. I didn’t feel Antioch was developed nearly as well as Frontiersman was; he came off fairly flat, and I didn’t come away from the book with strong feelings toward him one way or the other. Plus, while I respect the “same universe, converging narratives, shifting protagonist” idea of switching perspectives, it felt like a miss that we didn’t get much reflection from Frontiersman on this whole, y’know, being jailed thing. Man had a lot of character development in book 1! I want to see how he’d take this situation.
Overall, the pace of both just felt a little quick to me. The character work is solid – give it some room to breathe!
