Boom! Studios, one of the most successful of the current crop of small publishers, has made itself a sort of double-niche in the industry, carving out its own two squares of land where it has settled in and taken control. Of course they have some licensed properties—who doesn't these days?—but Boom!'s success rests on two things. On the one hand, they've got the Cthulhu thing going on; they're doing for comics what prose writers have been doing for years, taking on the mythos and inventing new characters and situations, with some cool results. On the other hand, they've created a minor industry out of making comic books that read like they were produced by Hollywood.
That's not surprising, considering that Ross Richie is running the show, and Johanna Stokes is one of their regular creators. But there are other comic book publishing houses started by Hollywood escapees, and none of the rest have managed to create books that feel so much like the (big or little) screen. Boom!'s got the self-contained, movie-paced miniseries down to an art. Or a science. Pick one.
Case in point: The Foundation. The trade paperback collecting the 5-book series takes about 90 minutes to read and is structured exactly like your typical Hollywood action thriller. It's a fun read, not light in tone, but quickly paced; the story keeps you moving along as you follow Stephen Valentine, an agent working for an organization that goes beneath the radar to prevent Nostradamus' hairier prophecies from coming true. All the fun secret-society, conspiracy-theory stuff is dealt out with a healthy dose of skepticism; even the Foundation's agents are generally skeptics. Any more detail on the plot would be telling, but suffice to say that there's a solid story here, with twists and action that never go over the top.
The series was written by the relatively unknown John Rozum and illustrated by Paul Azateca and Boom! mainstay Chee. The artwork is not really to my liking, being a bit heavy on the inks and lacking in fine detail, but I'm sure this style works for plenty of people. I have to say that I didn't really notice the art on my first read. The story completely drew me in, and it was only going back and looking more closely at some pages that I noticed, for example, that the coloring hearkens back to 80's Marvel: panels with no background detail, colored in bright solids that change from panel to panel. But whereas the heavy exposition and thought bubbles in those old Marvel books prevent you being drawn in and make the hideous backgrounds stand out, here it just all sort of glides on by.
Like Shmobots, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, or Dominion, another miniseries that recently came out in trade, The Foundation does a great job of showing what Boom! is best at. They've found their niche, and it makes for some nice little comics. I hope they stick with it for a while.
