Comic Review - Borderlands Origins: Roland

            I, like most other people that enjoy video games (look at the sales numbers, it’s true), love Borderlands.  I am not a FPS guy for the most part.  Tried Call of Duty, couldn’t get into it.  Haven’t even touched Halo yet.  Borderlands though?  Loved it.  I picked up the original in a bargain bin for probably $20 and couldn’t stop playing it.  The visuals were incredible, the story had just enough to move things along without being intrusive and getting in the way of the real fun; shooting bad guys and picking up loot.  Borderlands 2 was just as good if not better.  Hell, I’m only part of the way into it and I can already see a better story with great characters and humor that you rarely find in videogames. 

            When you take a videogame that I think so highly of, and then tell me that there is going to be a comic book created using the setting and characters, that is the point that I push all my chips to the center of the table.  I was “all in” for a Borderlands comic book, especially since the Mass Effect comics by Dark Horse were so well done.  IDW does a pretty decent job with licensed content as well (Transformers and Ghostbusters are two that come to mind as some of the best licensed comics of recent memory) so I was very optimistic about this endeavor going into it.

Cover:

            And then I saw the cover.  It is just plain boring.  A stoic shot of the title character?  Okay, I guess that works thematically because the book centers on Roland, but there is a distinct lack of dynamism in the image itself.  He is just standing there, holding a smoking gun, that’s it.  Hell, you can’t even see anything below his mid-thigh.  The bounty hunters from the first game (which I assume this “origins” series will be exploring in detail) are touted as some bad-ass individuals.  You’re telling me that you couldn’t come up with an image of him killing a Skag, or something a little more than just “generic shot of title character”?

            One of the things that I enjoy the most about the video game series is the art and graphics.  They are equal parts realistic but with a cartoony edge because of the particular cell-shading technique used.  Instead of using that technique, Augustin Padilla just draws it how someone from 1994 would and Esther Sanz colors it with just a wave of her muddy brush. 

2/10 - This could have been done better, and has been done better in the games themselves.  The logo is nice and clear, but that was obviously created by the video game guys too (why didn’t they just let them handle the book?).

Story:

            The story itself was written by Mikey Neumann, the creative director for the games.  This is great that they were able to get someone on board that had a hand in the creation of the games, and obviously Neumann knows more of the backstory of these characters than just some random writer off the street.  The story itself, however, is very generic.  I realize that Roland, as kick-ass as he may be as a playable character in the game, is relatively generic himself.  He is basically a rogue soldier, something that we have seen many times before.  Why does he go rogue though?  Well that is something that this comic is going to explain.  I realize that they only had one issue to do this, and they really do pack a bit into the allotted pages, but there could have been so much more done with this storyline than the basic “Roland got set up by a higher up in the organization, his team was killed and he was left for dead”.  Yawn.  Give me more conspiracy theory, give me more backhanded deals, give me something different than I have seen time and time again. 

            If you are going to do a basic plot like this, you have to give something extra, something to make it your own.  The Lord of the Rings, you may have heard of it, is basically just a quest story where instead of searching for the macguffin, they are trying to dispose of it, but Tolkien made it his own by expounding on the relationships, the dynamic in the group and by raising the stakes of failure to astronomical levels.  I realize that we are dealing with a twenty-four page comic book here and not a three novel epic, but this can be done on a smaller scale too.  Make me care about Roland and his team so that when they are killed it resonates with me.  Don’t just assume that I care about Roland because he was my character during my first playthrough of the original game (he was). 

           

            There are certain beats in the dialogue that do not make a whole lot of sense either.  The character Scraps on Roland’s team seemed to be starting a fight with Roland, and then five pages later (in the same scene, mind you) he is defending Roland, ready to tear his teammate’s head off for questioning their leader.  I wonder how this was not caught by the writer on his read-through, or at the very least by the editor. 

2/10 – Overall the dialogue feels about as wooden and lifeless as the rest of the plot.  There is so much potential and to have it go unrealized is a shame. 

Art:

            If you like the art of the games themselves, you will probably be highly disappointed by the art of the comic book.  The art feels as generic as the story which is sad considering how the art of game was so much different than pretty much anything on the market at the time.  The art of the game was bright, vibrant and detailed while the art here just looks like a something out of early 90s Extreme studios.  I’m not saying the art is terrible in and of itself, but when you are expecting something that looks at least similar to the video game and you get something else entirely, it can be quite disappointing. 

           

            The art itself can be hard to understand at times too, especially on the page where apparently everyone dies.  However we do not see them really die, and the camera angle flips so at first I thought that it was just a firefight with both sides receiving casualties instead of the massacre that it apparently turns out to be. 

This page is all kinds of confusing.  Which would make a little sense if it was an actual battle and not just a slaughter.

First you have the stiff, generic shot of the main character, then you have a plot device written plainly for everyone to see.  Is this a matter of bad writing or the writer having to condense ideas to fit the page requirements?

Who tailors suits to get wider when they hit the forearms? This is why you never see Popeye in anything but short sleeve shirts, because this makes no sense.

            I do like the design of the rhinoceros-looking creatures, though I am not sure whether Padilla designed those or someone else.  Regardless, he pulls off the stampede scene well by filling the page with the creatures, heightening the fear of being crushed by those massive creatures.

This is a cool panel, even if it does feel a bit Lion King-ish with the whole being led into a stampede plotline.

2/10 – This could have been so much better if they had just gone with a different style that mimicked the game more.  Other than that I am not too high on Padilla’s art and storytelling ability  anyway.

Overall: 2/10 – The groundwork was there for this to be an incredible supplement to some of the best games of this console generation.  I blame the one-issue format for some of the writing issues, having to try and condense Roland’s origin instead of giving it a little more leg room to get us interested, but ultimately the whole thing misses its mark.  It did make me want to go and play the game though, so good job with that.