Reviewed by Brady Steele. The story of the American Revolution continues to unfold and garner more and more interest with each passing issue. Rebels #3 stays in line with this upwards trajectory. This historical series sheds insightful and touching light on the men and women and the tolls a growing war takes on them.
WRITTEN BY: Brian Wood
ART BY: Andrea Mutti
PUBLISHER: Dark Horse Comics
PRICE: $3.99
RELEASE: 10 June 2015
It’s always fascinating for me to discover new ways to tell stories in comics. Not like reinventing the entire genre, mind-bending revelations per se but using the tools we know and love in a fresh way. Writer Brian Wood manages this feat with simplicity and subtleness. There are so many ways where less is more and it works so well with this story. You can feel the sheer weight of youngSeth Abbot’s plight finds himself in when trying to save his father. You can feel the struggles of newlywed Mercy Abbott daily chores and the difficulty of maintaining what is yours in the frontier land of young America.
All of this would not be possible without artist Andrea Mutti. The amount of grit and heft conveyed in the panels of this issue really make this story feel grounded in reality. Nothing feels safe or permanent in this ever changing new frontier. Things like cold and distance from home feel insurmountable at different points of this chapter. Bigger things feel just as momentous as a conversation between a young couple caught up in a country’s revolution.
I’ll admit I was not overwhelmed with the first issue of Rebels. I’ve never been a big fan of American history since I’m not from there. Wood and Mutti are doing a very good job of making me interested in how America came to be. I should know better to doubt Wood’s storytelling by now. I am happy to be wrong about this book and look forward to see how this intimate yet epic story unfolds.
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Mr. Steele enjoys all things comics and imagination-based. Using his lifetime of comic-fu-dom for good, he imparts his knowledge for the universe to enjoy and for you, dear readers, to pass it on.
Twitter: @mrbradysteele