As I said in my previous post, this one's gonna be about the first 4 issues of the new ongoing series "King Cryptid" from Alterna Comics.
This one's written by Alterna head honcho Pete Simetti, so it's different in a few ways from other titles at the company. For one thing, Pete tends to sit back and be the publisher/editor these days, so having him write a title for his own company seems like a change of pace at the moment.
For Some Another Thing, this is not a limited series. Sure, plenty of titles at Alterna come out as a "series of mini-series," and Brian Baugh's "Wulf and Batsy" is an ongoing, but for the most part, Alterna has focused lately on published creator-owned titles in mini-series format.
That all being said, you could be forgiven for thinking that King Cryptid was a vanity project; the big boss decides to use his own company to put out his own stuff, etc.
But I've read the first 4 issues and I can tell ya: it ain't like that.
Instead, this is clearly the opposite of anything like that.
King Cryptid comes across as a long-held personal dream of a title, with a deeply crafted world being slowly unfolded with care to us readers with a mixture of joy and restraint.
Each issue features a different artist. You might think that would result in a lack of cohesion, or that it's a sign of unprofessional, scatter-shot practices. Guess what? It's not.
Instead, the rotating artists lend their styles to the very different tones of the stories in each issue, making King Cryptid feel like a character and a series that can handle a myriad of tones and genres. It's a great idea, and the execution is even better.
And then there's the writing. Simetti proves more than able to script a comic book story, build a world, and craft characters that you can care about, all without wasting your time or dumping anvils of exposition on your head from the sky.
The title character is interesting enough, and fragments of his deeper history bubble to the surface just often enough to let us know that there is far more to him than even meets the eye. And what meets the eye is pretty cool: KC has one of the cooler main character designs (and silhouettes!) that I've seen in a comic book in quite some time.
The supporting characters are great, too. You want to know more about them. The "monsters of the week/issue" could have series/specials of their own, and it all just feels very "lived in."
I backed the crowdfunding project for these first four issues, and I liked them so much that I recently backed the project for issues 5 through 9. Here's hoping that Simetti gets to tell as much of this story and show us as much of this world as he wants to.
Here's the link to the Alterna Comics website where you can go and learn much more:
https://www.alternacomics.com/
And here's the excellent covers for issues 1 through 4:
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