THE ALMIGHTIES #1
Here’s an unusual offering from Actuality Press that was first published in 2012.
The Almighties is a team-up of superheroes, not so much in the mould of The Avengers or Justice League, but more in the offbeat manner of The Doom Patrol. They’re a misfit bunch of weirdoes who have been brought together by the mysterious Whiteout, who dresses all in white with a white mask, to combat threats to America.
The team consists of Maxi-Tron, who thinks he doesn’t need powers because he has a super suit of armour; Nightfang, a Brit who can turn into a werewolf; Miss F, who claims she can fly but doesn’t in this issue, and who also has super strength; Mason, a psychopathic mercenary; and the mysterious Stefanos who doesn’t actually have a superpower but wields a mean donner kebab and is, from his connections, the most powerful one of the team.
A comedic team with its tongue firmly in its cheek with some adult humour, The Almighties venture a little into Kick-Ass territory as they set out on their first of three missions in this issue.
The plot isn’t particularly deep, as they find the true nature of their mysterious leader and his motivations, but as a first issue it’s not a bad, if frantically-paced, read. The style of the art changes every few pages, which is normal in a long span of issues comprising a story arc, but a little distracting when it changes a few times within one issue. Personally, I preferred the clean lines of the first eleven pages.
Hopefully, the creative team will get small niggles like this and the occasional spelling error ironed out before the second instalment becomes available or maybe that should read became available, as it’s advertised in this issue as coming in 2013.
The concept certainly has promise and hopefully we’ll get to read the war cry of “Almighties Amass” again very soon. (Unless they adopt Stefanos’s preferred “who wants salad?”).
INFO: THE ALMIGHTIES #1 / WRITER: SAM JOHNSON, MIKE GAGNON / ARTIST: ELENORA KORTSTARZ, PABLO ZAMBRANO, D.C. WHITE / PUBLISHER: ACTUALITY PRESS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
