Good intentions or good grief?
What can be said to explain this comic properly. Well, essentially, you have 5 ordinariy people who are kidnapped and whisked away to a dimension/veil/planetoid symbiotic thing that looks like, for lack of a better explanation, a weird mutated version of a human female's anatomy.
Being the only 5 survivors of genetic experiments conducted by their alien humanoid captors, these 5 discover they have newfound powers via symbiotic hosts on their bodies. They manage to escape their captors and return to Earth.
The standard character interactions occur while they discover their powers as their alien abductors come looking for them, and a battle ensues.
The problem with this comic and I suspect the other books of this series, is the attempt to make the ordinary people a bit...too ordinary. Does anyone want to read about a Grandmother with super-strength? A one-armed obese man?
Also another suffering point is the art. One of the characters, a teen girl, looks like she's in her late 30's. The inks and colors are way too heavy and appear a bit cheap. It is distracting, and there is some cheesy dialogue and verbiage that is just too over the top.
The intentions of the comic though were good, trying to integrate a sense of realism with realistic characters in a Sci-Fi setting. It just failed because of the appearance of the aliens, these symbiotes which resemble large crabs or skeletal hands on the shoulders of the 5 characters. Also it seems like there is some type of weird fetish for having a lot of...moisture...and goop by either the writer (Jim Shooter) and/or the artist.
Defiant Comics went under not long after this series ended, and the primary reason was the speculative market of the 90's, and it didn't help matters much that Defiant, helmed by Jim Shooter, chose to use this as their flagship title. You can find these books IF you want, usually for very very cheap in most comic shops or online, flea markets, or like I did, got it free from a seller who obviously couldn't otherwise get rid of it.
If you see these, pass them up unless you have a morbid curiousity to see how Jim Shooter and Co. did a role reversal and screwed up a comic company with good intentions.
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