Copra: Round One

Superhero team tropes are viewed through an indie comics lens in this small press effort that is both a throwback and a look forward at contemporary genre blurring in comics. Fiffe (The Ultimates) wrote, drew, colored, and lettered 12 issues of this dense, action-packed tale in a year, trying to “break through the [Jack] Kirby Zone” by turning out comics in a fast but confident manner. The result is somewhere between Suicide Squad (the original inspiration) and early issues of Love and Rockets. COPRA is a team of misfit supermercenaries who get double-crossed on a mission to retrieve the skull of a long-dead foe that has a powerful lightning bolt embedded in it. After half the team is wiped out, the survivors are off on a cosmic caper that never lets up. Created at a fever pace, Fiffe’s latest manages to put that energy on the page. The art is a lively blend of angular Ditko fight scenes and Kirby explosions, captured with scratchy ink lines and hand-lettered sound effects. Fiffe sometimes gets a little carried away with action at the expense of exposition, but the book is so deliriously fun no one will complain. (Oct.)