What if the MOST DANGEROUS man on Earth was also the one trying to do the MOST GOOD? The world is real. The people are normal. And then he appears! A man appears with no background, no memory, and no place to call home. But he has powers. Powers that seem resemble those we learned about in Sunday School. Could it be?! Is it possible that this man is much, much more than that? Is it possible that he is our “SAVIOR” in the flesh? And if he is, then why doesn’t he know who he is or how he got his powers? Strip away the spandex and trappings of the traditional comic superhero and ask yourself a simple question:

“How would I react if GOD suddenly appeared in front of me, but everything we had been taught about him seems out of whack?” What you would have left, beyond your own doubts, is the presence of a man who has to deal with the fact that his appearance in the world is seen as both a blessing and a curse. Some will see him as a hero, a messiah. Other will see him as an enemy because there isn’t room for a person with god-like powers to disrupt the status quo of what we already believe. Some will rally behind him. Others will denounce him. But none of us will be able to ignore him.

Written by Todd McFarlane and Brian Holguin, Savior is certainly an ambitious book. Hence why I, an avowed atheist, picked it up. I mean, just reading above synopsis this sounds compelling, doesn’t it. It sort of reminds of Valiant Comic’s DIVINITY, which I am enjoying. Unfortunately, with this first issue at least, it’s not living up to it’s billing. I put that spoiler tag above because I want to explain exactly what I mean but, frankly, there’s not all that much to “spoil.”

It opens with a news reporter covering an event in a small city in Kansas. A man, simply being called “the miracle worker” is arriving via an armed escort and taken to building, while a crowd has gathered around to wait for him. When he arrives some are shouting that he’s the messiah, others that he’s a fake, a reporter on the scene alludes to some event that happened six months earlier (the tagline “RETURN to the MIRACLE AT DAMASCUS” is flashed across the TV screen), and she asks him if he think he’s God, to which he looks surprised. Then there’s the sound of a gunshot, and we see some specks of blood splattered on the reporter’s cheek, but we don’t see exactly what happened.

Flashback to six months earlier to the city of Damascus, Kansas. A woman named Cassie, a famous TV reporter from this city, is speaking at the local High School, which she graduated from. She’s treated like a hometown hero. She speaks of her career and makes some pretty spot-on comments about the state of journalism, especially in regards to the internet, today. Then as she’s been driven to the airport by her old friend Mary and Mary’s daughter, suddenly a large plane crashes on the road. Cassie grabs a first aid kit that Mary had in her car and rushes to the scene to try to help the survivors. There’s lot of destruction and blood, etc., and then off to the side of the road we see the man from before holding a woman in his arms.

And that’s it. To be continued. This issue didn’t exactly give us much to chew on. We barely see the “savior”. We get more scenes of Cassie, who I guess is supposed to be the POV character of the series? But that’s not clear. There’s also a little subplot of a local High School kid who sells drugs, I’m not sure what he means to this story, either. This issue felt extremely decompressed, like it’s 1/3 of a first chapter. I understand the need to try to build suspense but, really, nothing of any significance is revealed here. If this were a completed original graphic novel, that would be one thing, but for a first issue of an eight-issue miniseries, I think it needed more to hook the readers.

As it stands, I’ll probably check out the second issue, and see if it’s better. But I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about it. Clayton Crain does a decent enough job with the art, but it doesn’t particularly stand-out either.

Chacebook rating: THREE STARS

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