Written and Illustrated by Michel Fiffe
Published by Image Comics
Michel Fiffe did something truly cool when he created this book. He basically wrote and drew up a continuation of the Suicide Squad series from DC that John Ostrander wrote in the 1980’s
Obviously, these aren’t the Suicide Squad by name. But, if you squint just enough you can see the DC super team (okay, fine, squint just a LITTLE). It does make for some real interesting reading.
The Copra groups is a collection of secret ops super people. They gather together for some crazy missions.
Each chapter is wildly different. I once heard this book described as if the creator was given a can of spray paint and nothing to lose. That pretty much sums up how I felt rereading this series.
The first six chapters of this hardcover have the team tracking down an artifact that came from another dimension. A thief took off with this artifact. This caused an entire town to blow up. The Copra group has to try and track down this thief and deal with the artifact before more damage happens.
These first six issues aren’t terribly complex.
The plot is pretty threadbare and the characters themselves aren’t very developed. That is part of the charm of the series. It also holds it back a bit as there is not a lot for the reader to hold onto.
By the seventh chapter, Fiffe focuses on the characters a bit more. We get to learn a little more about them and what motivates them. We also get to see Fiffe starting to really experiment with the form of comics as well. There is definitely a brilliance there, whether or not I understand it completely.
The last few chapters show the team going on yet another Suicide Squad-like mission. It started to get old for me by about that point. I finished it but I still wanted a bit more meat on this story.
Sadly, it never showed up.
Still, Copra is a book worth reading, if only to try something new, or to expand your horizons a bit. It’s graphically excellent with a simplistic script.
Fiffe is one of the more interesting and intriguing creators out there, and he takes some big swings with this.
A lot of those swings pay off. It’s the ones that don’t that make it a bit hard to get through.
RATING: B+
