Velocity: Pilot Season #1
Pilot Season issue
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Kevin Maguire
Colors by Blond
Letters by Troy Peteri
Top Cow Productions
Cover price $2.99; On-sale date: Oct. 24, 2007

One of five Pilot Season comics that Top Cow is releasing, Velocity #1 cruises along like an octogenarian in a Ford Festiva powered by rubber bands. The book hits a few peaks as the title character zooms through plotline loopholes, each transition a jolting stutter into the next scenario. But wholly this comic screeches to a halt and misses crucial elements a first issue should accomplish before leaving the reader in a pool of disappointment.

Written by Joe Casey (WildCats 3.0, Godland), Velocity’s highlights include the inner monologues of Carin Taylor, aka Velocity, whose whimsy and post-teenage sarcasm shine in the face of the dingy script. In her own book, the junior Cyberforce speedster garners our focus in an issue so blatantly disregarded as throw-away material. We’re given the true voice of the character, one with tremendous potential. Unfortunately she’s masked by Casey’s pastiches of feminine characterizations.

Each moment unfolds into a horribly predictable narrative thread: We get a character introduction with mild background information, a foreshadowing of a mad scientist scheme to gain control of Velocity, and the fumbling and underwhelming ensuing repercussions. Issue 1 of Velocity: Pilot Season is a real failure to expound on a character with heightened speed. Velocity doesn’t do anything new in the realm of super-quick heroes; instead Casey gives us a rehash of speed powers from dated Flash comics.

My main complaint with Velocity isn’t Casey’s heavy-handed writing (it’s a pretty close second), though. One of the biggest obstacles to enjoying the book is the rampant use of color holds, blurring, and filtering flares, effectively covering up Kevin Maguire’s artwork. And the question I ask is “Why?” Maguire’s earned his stripes on books such as DC’s Justice League and Marvel’s Defenders. Despite most of his renderings in Velocity echoing early Todd MacFarlane work, it’s damaging to dilute the man’s artwork (as cartoonish as it might be) with computer-generated short-hand. I get it. Velocity’s supposed to be fast. I don’t need to be smacked in the face with multiple panels of Gaussian blur.

The reader is often scrambling to play catch-up to Casey’s scene jumps and the limited exposition on Velocity’s background may put off some readers, but it’s the minute scope of her character that begs for more. I could understand how one character could get shoved to the side in a team book such as Cyberforce, but in her own title Velocity still is played down as a second-tier hero, not the first-rate speedster one would expect from a comic bearing her name. Casey’s main character is a shell of a person, a cardboard stand-in playing surrogate to the real superheroes of comics today. With Velocity: Pilot Season #1, Top Cow has missed the cart ride if the company wants to jump on the superhero bandwagon.