It's A Weird Weird Weird World
The Good: The art style's a little weird but I kind of like it. It's obviously a little dated, but once you get into it you hardly notice.
The beginning does a pretty good job of introducing you to the character, although it almost feels like it comes on the heels of another arc.
The weirdness is there in spades. I feel like I'm reading Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol in some ways. The situations and other characters remind me very much of it, although the main character himself offers something different and new to that kind of situation.
A lot of the tension is captured nicely. There's a great scene where David's arm suddenly grows back and we see it split into 6 thin tall panels side by side as we watch the new arm form.
You can definitely feel that Rozum's strong point is his characters. There's plenty of crazy action, but there's a bunch of snippets of dialogue sewn into it teaching us more about Xombi as he fights. It's the first few pages that capture David Kim completely before he's thrust into this world of weirdness that really makes this book. And the way the last page reflects the first scene was very clever.
The Bad: Although this was Xombi's first appearance, it's not the best intro to the character. It starts out with a feeling you arrived in the theater late. As if this is the first episode of a show that you really should've seen the intro T.V. movie to understand. David and some other guy are drinking and talking about the grand adventure they just had, and how David's done with this weirdness and he's moving on with his life. I feel very much like I missed something, and I'm hoping the ongoing series clears this up a bit.
The entire issue, outside character establishment and development, is pretty much just this huge 3-way argument between Twilight, Rainsaw, and Xombi. With Twilight and Rainsaw both trying to get David to join their respective causes and David trying to stay the hell out of their conflict altogether. Honestly by the end I'm in the same boat as David, I just want both of them to shut the hell up. I don't know who's right, and frankly I'm having a hard time caring. Neither one of them is very specific on the nature of the war and so they both come off as obnoxious. I guess I'll have to get the other parts of the crossover to see what's going on, but I'm not sure if I will. I'm more interested in getting Xombi #1.
In Conclusion: 3/5
Milestone was a really good imprint as a whole. I'm still just starting to get into most of the series' (4 issues of Static, 8 of Icon, 3 of Hardware, 1 of Xombi) but already they generally leave a good taste in my brain. But on a personal level, Xombi stands out the most. Icon is about a lot of real down-to-earth issues, Static is fun and cool, Hardware is brutal and badass, but Xombi fills a niche that isn't so often filled. The kind of weird that's so weird you couldn't imagine that you could come up with anything close to it, and yet it doesn't lose itself in the weirdness. It's not just 23 pages of nonsense for the sake of being nonsense, it's a setting for the characters to go through their own personal struggles as well as saving the world. I wouldn't use this issue to start off reading Xombi, but it's not entirely bad. But you wouldn't be missing too much by skipping over it right to Xombi #1.