You don’t get a lot of comic book protagonists who are perfectly content with their meager, comfortable lives, but that’s what we have in Tomas Ramirez of The Saviors. He’s a small-town stoner living near an Air Force base where they still have full-service gas stations, and he likes the familiar and never wants to leave the town of Passburg, where Sheriff Doyle don’t give a damn and he can hang out, smoke weed, and talk to random lizards as if they’re best pals. It’s possible he’s just talking a good game to himself and is hiding some kind of ambition, but it sure don’t seem like it.
One day after work, as he’s watching “the air show,” he hears something weird, and upon sneaky investigation, it seems that Ol’ Sheriff Doyle and one of the local military officer-types are yakkin’ in a language that don’t make no sense, and he’ll be damned if they ain’t wearin’ lizard faces, too. He skedaddles to talk to his friend Frank at the auto yard about it, but he just convinces him that maybe he was a bit too hopped up on the reefer and maybe the concept of ‘moderation’ shouldn’t be alien to Tomas. But when Doyle catches up with him at Frank’s and is insisting that they go for a ride, and then a mysterious out-of-towner who stopped at the gas station earlier shows up, runs Doyle off the road and warns Tomas away from him… and then Doyle up and shoots Frank in the head… all bets are off, and Tomas has to hope his dirt bike can outrun the po-po. That’s no easy feat when the po-po can morph into some crazy loping spikey frog monster what looks like it escaped from a B.P.R.D. comic.
The Saviors #1 is a perfectly fine book from James Robinson, featuring low-key, black-& white, “Darwyn Cooke meets Mike Mignola” art from J. Bone, although it also doesn’t feel like anything particularly special. Given the talent involved, it will probably wind up growing into something more, but from the outset, it’s very much a They Live kind of feel going on – the one guy who realizes that people are secretly space monsters or lizard people or what-have-you. What threw me at first is that the Military Lizard Man, our first look at the ‘space face,’ looked a hell of a lot like the Red Skull. Also, Ramirez is interesting because, while most every story has an ordinary guy thrust into extraordinary circumstances, he actually feels like an truly ordinary guy, rather than some kind of Chosen One that we’re just waiting to see get chosen.
Overall, though, nothing too exciting or different yet, but The Saviors should make for a leisurely, enjoyable sort of read when it’s all said and done.
