INDIGO CHILDREN #1: The Chances Of Anything Coming From Mars…

There’s something deeply familiar about issue #1 of this series. The gifted children trope isn’t an unusual concept. Still, it’s the spin writers Curt Pires and Rockwell White on that trope and the delivery on the page by artist Alex Diotto, colorist Dee Cunniffe and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou that sucks you in. The issue opens with mysterious supernatural imagery involving the book’s namesake in Egypt and then moves to a tragic event at an airport and is bookended by more details of the same tragic event, which ties back to the mysterious children. In a bold move, the creative team almost immediately gives up some huge secrets, which is unusual but plays very well here. In between, the innovative team takes us on a journey using journalist Donovan Price as our touchstone. We meet Alexei, a gifted child, mathematical genius, and in his own words, a former citizen of the planet Mars in a previous life. Yes, you heard that correctly. Mars. Alexei states in a secret video his kind is here to prevent humankind from making the same mistake that led to nuclear war that rendered Mars uninhabitable. These are big, bold swings to take in your opening issue from Pires and White, but the script is exceptionally well constructed and moves at an astounding pace from the word go.

The supernatural elements are offset by the investigative thriller noir elements of Price’s investigation which leads him on a journey to Russia, a mysterious town that does not exist, and several interesting characters that help him on his way. The characters that the script focuses on are wholly three-dimensional. The whole thing reads like a supernatural sci-fi thriller set in a recognizable world of pandemics and dead real-world figures. I don’t think I’ve read anything in recent memory that reads as flawlessly and at such an incredibly blistering pace in a while where you only remember to draw a breath when you finish reading. It’s worth mentioning that I was not familiar with the term Indigo Children until I read this, do yourself a favor and just put Indigo Children into Google. It’s an actual world term that the creative team has taken and amped up with a healthy dose of science fiction which I think is pretty clever.

The art from Alex Diotto is very grounded and earthy in the style of a noir spy story most of the time. There’s a gritty, real-world feel to every line most of the time, with colorist Dee Cunniffe using cold blues, warm yellows, and earthy tones. This is then contrasted with white and the use of the color indigo for the scenes involving these very gifted children manifesting their strange abilities.

My favorite thing about this issue from an art standpoint is the how beautifully efficient every image in each panel is. The paneling is flawlessly cinematic, pulling your eye across the page at an absolutely pitch-perfect pace; not one panel is gratuitous or wasted. Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou takes slightly less risks here with the lettering than some of his other work but it suits the feel of the story and he still manages to show off lettering as the art form that it is. They say that one of the powers of movies is how they can totally control rate, something much harder to do in the comic medium. , I would use this comic as a perfect example of how an art team can control the rate exceptionally well. I’ll say it now. This series has got tv series or movie written all over it.