Assassin Nation, Volume 1: Number One With a Bullet Review (Kyle Starks, Erica Henderson)

I’ve never been a fan of Kyle Starks having tried and abandoned his previous comics Sexcastle and Rock Candy Mountain, but I decided to stick out Assassin Nation if only to see if I was wrong and his bad stories somehow got better over the course of a complete book. Nope - I was wrong about being wrong!

A guy hires the world’s top 20 assassins to find out who’s trying to kill him. And they do. And you won’t care.

Starks’ writing is like reading a sub-par American Dad or Archer script by someone who’s not even remotely funny. There’s a character called Dave who’s talkative and daft and he plays the annoying character who’s talkative and daft. There’s a character called Fuck. Woah, how kerazy and unexpected! There’s a character whose name appears in big bold letters like a corny theme song from an old TV show. Are you laughing yet? Because I was this close to throwing the comic in the bin after that opening chapter! There’s nothing worse than reading someone who thinks they’re hysterical and they’re actually anything but.

I also don’t see what people like about Erica Henderson’s fugly art. It was shit on The Unbearable Squirrel Girl and it’s shit here. The pages are so bland with single colour backgrounds and uninteresting facial expressions on ordinary, forgettable character designs. The action sequences are poorly mapped out so it’s not totally clear what’s happening in them making them unengaging to read.

There are too many characters here even though Starks cuts the numbers down drastically over the course of the story. They’re only ever indistinct and dull, regardless of how long they stick around for. He tries to make one of them the main character by giving him a motivation beyond money - which is more than most of them get - where he’s trying to avenge the death of his husband, but it doesn’t work. I couldn’t even tell you the guy’s name.

The friendships the surviving assassins develop is unconvincing - would elite killers really be so eager and open to new relationships? Oh right, yeah, this is shite Archer so probably because bad Melissa McCarthy-level comedy. I guessed who was really targeting the guy not even before the halfway point and think I kept reading at least partially to find out if I was right. And the “explaining it all in one long monologue at the end” cliche just made me angry at the laziness of the writing.

Unfunny, boring tripe that looks exactly as bad as it reads - Assassin Nation is ass.