A review of Curse of the Vessel #0

 I just got my Curse of the Vessel #0 in the mail today. 

Curse of the Vessel official site 

I'm so stoked! It's been a looong wait for this book! I've followed this book from it's inception a what a treat to finally be able to read it!!
The Curse of the Vessel was created for the Small Idol Press competition where teams of creators compete against each other to see who can make the best comic. It was a grueling competition where the judges were often very harsh on the competitors, but the creators say that they learned a lot and was overall a good experience.
I first saw Danny's work way back in June 2009. He had submitted this picture to a friends web site -

 I loved it right away! I love the old feel of the picture, the car, the pose of the character. Cool stuff! I've been following Danny ever since. He often posts his awesome work on his Facebook page but I haven't seen very much sequential pages from him till now. And I'm impressed!

Now for the review

At first glance I loved the cover! I've seen it before but it came out really nice in print! The art, the lettering, the coloring, everything is really nice and dynamic. The art on the inside is equally nice. Danny's style is deceptively simple. He's got a way of conveying a lot of information in those rude lines. 

I'm always surprised by little details like the postures of the people and the small facial gestures, or even the figure of a girl. His art is not pretty but somehow he manages to capture the sexiness of woman. 

His sequentials are equally deceptively simple. I read through it in a breeze not once questioning anything, or finding anything odd. They were really simple and well done.

About the story, I was surprised about it. I have never read anything by Michael Leal so I had nothing to base his work on. I had read the concept as it was written for the Small Idol Press competition. I loved it right off the bat. What a cool idea it is to have a guy be a vessel for spirits of the dead! And there is so much that you can do with a concept like that! I remember the judges at SIP giving all kinds off crap about it. They said that they had seen this concept done a million times. I couldn't understand what they were talking about. Sure I've seen things that may have resembled it slightly, but Michael's take seemed very fresh and this subject has by no means been worked to death as they were making it sound! It was humorous to watch in the end Michael standing his ground and challenging them to come up with an example of another comic with the same concept. Someone did come up with a very obscure comic but nothing that was know by the masses or significantly similar to it. 

Though I loved the concept, I myself couldn't see how he was going to pull off an interesting story from this. It seemed like too much story for a 4 issue mini series. But let me tell you he has! The first issue is only 12 pages (that's a little disappointing considering the $3.99 price) and in 12 pages Michael has given us the origin, concept and a cute little story to boot! And the tone of the story is just to my liking! Part gangster story, part man on the run, throw in a little magic for good measure and vuala, you have the Vessel!

And lets not forget Nik Poliwko's great inks and Michael Mcelveen's moody colors! They do so much to make Danny's art the best that it can be! Great job all around.

I really can't wait to see the rest of the series and I hope they continue to do COTV for some time to come! Say maybe 80 issues like Robinson's Starman or something! what do you say guys?

For those of you who haven't already got your copies you can get them here at Small Idol Press! I highly recommend it!

Curse of the Vessel issue 0