I want King to be my grandpa. Who doesn’t want a gun toting, burrito eating, zombie fighting bad ass for a grandpa? All that, and he’s a dead ringer for Elvis Presley, who I love so much I named my cat after him.
My cat hates me for it.
What I like most about King is the crazy imagery. A speaking heart flies around with a propeller. King takes a bus to go fight zombies. King offers a bullet as a tip, which I can relate to. There’s no excuse for bad service.
The storytelling is very intuitive, using predominantly subject to subject and aspect to aspect panel transitions. If you need everything that happens in the gutter spelled out for you, you’re not going to do well with King. There’s little explanation of who King actually is or why he kills inhuman beasts, but stories that give all that information up front annoy me anyway. King lets you figure it out on your own, which I like.
King uses very little dialogue. Most of it is spent setting things up in the beginning and from there it’s almost a purely visual story. Daniel Bradford, King’s artist, said in a previous interview that Mike Mignola’s work on Gotham By Gaslight changed the course of his career. The influence is apparent in King.
At twenty-four uninterrupted pages, King is a quick and entertaining read. I’m really looking forward to seeing where Bradford and writer Thomas Hall take this character. King is available at the Blacklist Studios website.
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[...] 13 is the new comic from Thomas Hall and Daniel Bradford, who previously brought us KING!. In issue #1, fishermen catch a robot in their net and are quickly set upon by a giant tentacle [...]