The Paybacks #1 review
*Doing your best commercial/infomercial voice*
SUPERHEROES! Do you have an unquenchable desire to do good? Do you have super powers that are going to waste? Are you wasting your life away at a dead end job because you just don’t have the financial means to fight crime? Well look no further, Mr Pierce is here for YOU!
I imagined that infomercial while reading the first issue of The Paybacks from Donny Cates and Eliot Rahal. The book brings up a great concept, how do a lot of crime fighting super heroes get their funds, and how in the hell did they get their start up in the first place? I mean, not every super hero has a million dollar mansion complete with underground cave trusted down to them from their parents, others can’t work a full time job and fly to a crystal palace, and most can’t crash free of charge at a bald wheelchair bound mind reader’s “school” either. So the answer is loans, obviously.
Who those loans come from, that’s a little secret, but who comes to collect when payments aren’t made, that’s where The Paybacks come in. Repo-men of sorts, if you can’t pay, they repo all of your cool toys and gadgets and enlist you into their service until said debt is repaid. Through The Paybacks #1 however, it appears that this may be like getting married into the mob and there isn’t any actual “paying back”. Suckers.
The Paybacks #1 besides having a really cool original idea that actually works, it’s actually quite fun. Because the book is through Dark Horse there’s no known or marketed heroes, so everything is really tongue-in-cheek capitalizing on super hero tropes and stereotypes. Just take the first hero they repo, his name is Knight Night and he has a unicorn armored horse named Knight Mare, it’s easy comedy, it’s right there. The book’s full of this stuff.
Cheeky, original, and fun, The Paybacks #1 is a sight to be seen. Be sure to check out this band of misfits as I’m sure this book will be a classic among cult fanatics. As in cult classics, not cultists or fanatics…phrasing.
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