20 years of Dawn
Dawn was a character I always wanted to check out, but never really figured out where to start. That tends to happen with a comic book market so saturated with Superheroes alone. This book has been sitting in my too read pile for a year if not more and I had to push it higher up on the list because my current reading fetish is "anniversaries". Partly because of the milestones I've hit and more importantly my 1 year anniversary on the site is coming up, so I am in the mind set of how people have celebrated anniversaries. Dawn has been in print now for over 20 years and outside hardcore comic fans how many of them really have read a Dawn comic? I love the none mainstream stuff and this is a series I just never got a chance to dig deep in and I believe this comic is a great jump in point.
As a one-shot Joseph Michael Lisner (JML) was smart to use the first three pages as an intro to his universe. Being three pages is a good enough amount of pages where older fans likely would breeze and not be bored, while new readers have a chance to be prepared for the universe to unfold.
As being a One-Shot this single issue doesn't have a huge impact to the overall Dawn story and it is pretty clear that this story is a self-contained story and really nothing more. In the closing page of this book JML says that this story was inspired by an old myth and classic myths are important and all great stories tap into these classic archetypes: intentional or unintentional. I agree so much with that all great stories are retelling of older stories, just different faces to these myths. This is what Dawn is about, birth and rebirth, old stories rebirth with different faces to them, but truths universal and unchanging. This one-shot really sold the universe to me and I would love to check out more Dawn books.
The selling feature is the pin-ups in the back. To what I know of this was the only time JML let other artist draw Dawn and it was great seeing Good Girl take from Adam Hughes and some other looks more towards the Bad Girl art style, the biggest treat was seeing Michael Turner do a pin-up since there will never again be a chance at that.
I would recommend this book for anyone interested in the Dawn series, it got me interested and I think it would be a nice jump in point for anyone.
Cheers
- Silkcuts