Icon and Rocket Season One #1

I am incredibly happy that we are back in Dakota City for stories. The Milestone characters are such a rich and often untapped group of characters with a brilliant legacy. Highlighting black characters and black creators is incredibly important work and I’m happy to see DC  out here doing the work. And while there is exceptional potential for Icon and Rocket moving forward and this first season will likely be wonderful as a whole, this first issue is sadly not very good and its making me more and more mad the more I try and think about it.

On paper, this series should be a smash hit. The art team is incredible. You have our friends at ANDWORLD design on letters and it doesn’t get much better than that. And you have a compelling pair of central characters with cool backstories and a fascinating chemistry together. Except that is where we go off the rails. Not enough happens in this first issue while simultaneously too much is happening. We open on Icon’s (slightly altered) origin as a maroooned alien but the approach to it was muddy and drawn out over too many pages. These pages were the highlight artistically but were narratively a bit of a mess. We move from there into the expected first meeting between the titular characters. At this point, we’re 17 pages into the first issue and while we’ve seen the origin for Icon, we haven’t really gotten to know the character. We know little of Rocket but not enough to forge a bond for a new reader. Then the final pages of the issue have Rocket pitching to Icon why he should be a superhero and actually help the community. There are small bits of a flashback that point to a time he may have done this before and the issue ends with him agreeing to be a hero.

The pacing is terrible, almost nothing happens, and the characters are presented as incredibly flat. Conceptually, it seems like the series could come together and read better as a trade. The notion of a superhero motivated by the community is always one interesting to explore and the potential of having the duo take on systemic racism is too good to miss. But without the Milestone nostalgie, I’m not certain how many new readers could come to this book and decide to stay. If this book dies on the vine because of poor sales, it will certainly be because of this first issue.