Written by Kyle Higgins
Art by Felipe Watanabe
Published by Image Comics
What do you get when you combine supernatural immortals, bloody violence, a world at war, and an ordinary man thrust on a journey extraordinary power?
No, it’s not Masters of the Universe: Revelation.
But we get a potent mixture of those elements for Ordinary Gods.
This first issue doesn’t bother with mysteries and drip-drip messing about. Even the preamble to the main story is bathed in blood.
Five gods from another dimension are imprisoned on Earth, forced into an endless cycle of human death and reincarnation with people who will never understand their secret.
Amid all this is Christopher, an unremarkable young man whose life is about to – flip! – turn upside down. Because it turns out he’s a reincarnated god, and (I think) a body-hopping god-assassin is out to kill his mortal form before he assumes his power.
The plot twist by which the sugar-honey-ice-tea hits the fan, unfortunately, feels like it’s done for shock value’s sake, and may be hard to swallow if violence gets to you.
Felipe Watanabe’s art is dynamic and mighty, though. Maybe that’s why the twist hit so hard?
In the telling of the 13 gods and the overthrow of their ruler, Watanabe chooses splash pages and wide panels. But when we return to Earth, everything is smaller, more intimate, with lots of closeups and strong facial expressions that remind me of Duncan Fegredo.
That’s actually a solid comparison, as Fegredo was just as at home drawing everyday items as he was drawing the fantastical worlds of Hellblazer, Hellboy and The Sandman.
Kyle Higgins appears to be having fun with how this title can function. A fun thing about a story in which a character has lived through countless reincarnations is that it allows for the writer to tell many kinds of stories inside this story.
The opening scene in with Tokyo Yakuza bosses is then reflected in an epilogue short story featuring the characters from that preamble.
That could be fun to do, issue to issue. Not a bad idea at all!
