“Freshmen Volume 1″
By Hugh Sterbakov and Leonard Kirk
TOP COW PRODUCTIONS
College, next to puberty, is easily the most life-changing
experience people go through before adulthood. Co-creators Seth
Green (yes, that Seth Green) and Hugh Sterbakov have taken this
fact of life and put a superhero spin on the rite of going off on
one’s own for the first time.
“Freshmen Volume 1″ is a trade paperback collecting
the first six issues of the series. “Freshmen” follows
14 freshmen at Freese University, who are forced to live in
overflow housing when the dorms are overbooked. While struggling to
fit in, they are transformed one night by an electrical explosion.
As a result, each of them are given powers based on what they were
thinking about at the time of the accident.
This leads to characters with powers such as being able to enter
others’ heads, a vegan being able to talk to plants, and a
boy unsure of his sexual prowess becoming grotesquely …
well-endowed.
This is all fairly amusing at first but quickly grows stale. The
powers these characters have aren’t terribly interesting for
the most part, and much of the dialogue is fairly stilted and
painfully unfunny, like your friend going to open mic night at Brew
Co. and making jokes that no one laughs at.
Speaking of dialogue, “Freshmen” has one truly
irritating wrinkle that makes it impossible to read smoothly.
Characters in the comic curse constantly, but instead of showing
the offending words, the writers have chosen to “bleep”
them out. This involves literally pasting the word
“bleep” over the words, leaving them still somewhat
visible but not completely. This makes the book a disjointed read,
as you must stop every few lines for a second to decipher what the
characters are saying. If this is the policy that Top Cow takes on
obscenity, then what’s the point of even having characters
curse in the first place?
“Freshmen” is far from daring. Its art recalls
blase, ’90s DC Comics (post-Dan Jurgens
“Superman”). The colors, situations and settings just
scream boring. The plot is also filled with banal observations of
college life. For the record: the villains in
“Freshmen” are muscle-bound frat guys, college parties
aren’t filled with philosophical conversations, and frat guys
are evil. Did I mention frat guys are evil?
“Freshmen” barely makes use of its college setting
beyond the title. Characters never go to class, rarely talk about
schoolwork, and aren’t really seen as actual people ““
just superheroes.
If you want to see superheroes in real-world settings, go read
“Watchmen.” Alan Moore’s stones were too big to
“bleep” anything the Comedian said.