A Spark Of Something Special: Reviewing ‘Static: Season One’ #6

Reboots can be a dicey endeavor. Finding that connection to what people might love about a thing while also doing something new and different can be a tough balance to achieve. For every successful rebooted character/story/franchise/etc there are many others scattered about that didn’t make it for a variety of reasons.

When it comes to the return of Milestone, and Static: Season One, in particular, this reboot shot well past just successful into something off the scales.

What Vita Ayala, Nikolas Draper-Ivey, Andworld Design CrissChross, and Will Quintana brought to life over these six issues has been amazing. There is no doubt at all that this is a superhero story for the ages. It’s a book that is gorgeous to behold, engaging, fun, real, emotional, and shows how to perfectly blend issues and movements of the real world into the realms of superheroes and superpowers. If someone asked for a book to fully show off what comic books can and should be when speaking about superheroes, this is a book that I would hand them no questions asked.

Time and time again we circle back to just how epic the character work of Ayala is, and that will not change now or probably ever. They have the gift of making any character, no matter how big or small, feel real with depth and purpose, and emotion. This is a lived-in-fleshed-out world, that still has so much more to explore. Nothing and no one feels like a throwaway character or even feels like just a support character.

Static might be the one with his name on the cover and be the hero of the day, but everyone else is pretty darn important to the story being told here.

Words don’t even justify what Draper-Ivey is producing in this book. It’s not just that it’s detailed and gorgeous, it’s that there is an energy to the work that just isn’t seen in a lot of other books. This isn’t a dig as we’re in a golden age of comic book art right now, but just like many others, he has a very visually distinctive style and energy that permeates through every page.

There are pages where Static uses his powers where things take on an electrical appearance, followed by a truly fully blacked-out page with just Static’s power illuminating that was heroically terrifying. This same energy is unleashed within the bold and bright but also weighted colors that he chooses for each page or panel.

Everyone at Andworld Design is just killing it as they take on more and more books, and it’s clear why their work is in such demand. All the same bits of energy on display from other creators of the book are there in their lettering work, all the various words coming with their own personality or focus depending on the given panel or page. SFX that pop off the page and are in your face making the given moments something extra, as those sounds are ‘heard’ the second they are seen.

I cannot wait to dive back in and read this again, straight through collected, and seeing the end announcement of a season two on the way this summer was perfect. Fingers crossed the whole crew is still together creating this book, because they have found something powerful and magical in what they are doing and it would be criminal to not keep that going.

Static: Season One #6 is now on sale in print and digitally from DC Comics.