When I picked up Extermination #1 I was genuinely excited. Besides the awesome price of one buck. That’s right it’s only a buck for the first issue. What else excited me was the premise of the book itself. Aliens have come to earth and kicked our butts but good. In the aftermath we find the superheros and villains of this world forced to unite to fight a common foe. For this I give Creator Matt Gagnon and writer Simon Spurrier a tip of the hat for a good model to build off of.

Jeffery Edwards art on the book is pretty standard stuff. To me the world in which we find the characters needs to have as much life to it as the characters we read about. We know that artists have the ability to give us great pictures of muscular people, but the devil is in the detail of everything else in the art. The post apocalyptic world the story takes place in didn’t seem to serve much more than a back drop for the battles.

I like the design of the aliens and hope that the subsequent issues might expand on them more. Canned reasons for attacking the world such as evil overlords from outer space just won’t do anymore. Readers have been raised on a steady diet of this stuff and to catch and hold a reader you need a little more meat. A great example taking a traditional us verse them and putting it on it’s head is the original Enemy Mine movie. We might get that later but not yet in the first issue.

I could go into a list of things I thought could have been done better with the plot, the two main characters of Nox and the Red Reaper, or any number of other things but I think I will just sum it up as an opportunity lost at this point.

I think my disappointment stems from my high hopes for the story. When I had heard the idea of it, I had so many things that came to mind. Like the original planet of the ape’s or H.G. Wells war of the worlds. Real stories of man fighting for it’s very survival. Stories that take a good look inward at the faults of the human race that seem to be put under a microscope in situations like this. While our lack of being able to read warning signs or work together brings us to the brink. And like in the above mentioned stories our simple tenacity to not simply roll over and die, drives us to fight against impossible odds.

In closing I will say this is only the first issue and things might change greatly as the story unfolds and we are given more to chew on. I real would like this book to do well and hope that it does. I’ll be waiting to read the second issue and see how they intend to improve on the story and plot.