With Wildstorm seizing control of the Friday the 13th license from previous publisher, Avatar, a whole new creative team and a whole new direction is in store for Jason fans. Is it any good? Well, maybe. The art is passable. Jason looks fantastic but the teenagers are pretty ugly. One thing I did notice, as a serious Friday the 13th fan, is that the artists Adam Archer and Peter Guzman paid close attention to the first Friday the 13th film before drawing the environments. Crystal Lake, from the old timey part of town to the diner, are taken straight from the flick. Pretty cool, if you ask me. The writing is more of the standard horror movie cliches: we’ve got the nerd punching bag, the the sex-crazy black couple, the punk, the reefer adicts, the wealthy asshole and the blonde lesbian heroine. It would be nice if authors Justine Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti had decided to break these tired trends, but I suppose they’re going for nostalgia. Don’t expect much of Jason from this issue (oh, by the way, they spell “Voorhees” wrong, which infuriates me) as it’s mostly set-up, but we’re sure to get some machete action soon enough. The “history of Jason” recap provided by the dimwitted counselors is pretty skewed from the facts (nobody seems to be aware that Movies 2 through 9 ever happened) but that’s not unusual, even in the realm of the Friday the 13th films, where everyone seems to get Jason’s history wrong.
Kick ass cover, though.