Otis Stein #1

Warning, Spoilers Ahead

Otis Stein starts out like a depressing movie.  Otis goes and collects his mail, complaining how the bills are piling up, how heartbroken he is about him and his wife Mary are about losing their child and how the only thing keeping him going is her.  Seeing how they are in debt, his idea to get out of this is to go dig out his family’s old still and make some moonshine.  This will make them all the money they need to get back on track and out of debt in only a few days.  Not the most original story, but it is something.  (side note, if he can make all of this money making moonshine, why didn’t he just do this from the start before going into debt?)

Meanwhile, Mary apparently has her own secrets.  From the looks of it she was part of a cult which she ran away from and was found by them at some point.  They offered to forgive her and save their daughter in return for Otis.  She couldn’t do it, she needed Otis in her life and that was more important than saving the life of her child.  Now, this is where I personally get confused since I can not think of any mother who wouldn’t want to save the life of their own child over anything else.

Anyway, Otis hooks up the still and it blows up, killing him.  Mary is so upset about this that she decides to use some of the cult magic she learned and bring Otis back to life.  This alerts the cult who come storming in and take over reviving Otis.  However, this turns him into an empty husk under the power of the cult.  This leads to a conflict between Mary and the cult with Otis in the middle.  The second half of the comic was more interesting, but still didn’t really catch my interest.

Part of the reason I really wasn’t sucked into this comic was due to the illustrations.  Now, I will say that the illustrations are not bad by any means.  Almost every panel has some good levels of detail to them. However, this is a black and white comic and I am not a huge fan of comics that are not in color.  I feel that a certain level of detail is missing with just using black, white and grays. I found that to be the issue near the end of the comic where there was some action going on and it was a little hard to decipher what was going on.

I expected more from Otis Stein #1.  The story was alright, but nothing that really gripped me.  The illustrations, while good, would have been better with color.  Everything about this comic felt average to me.