The Unwanted
Written by Diablo, Mark Michaels
Illustrated (pencils/inks) by Juan Romero
Letters by Jason Arthur
Diablo Publishing
Cover Price: $15.00; Available now

The Unwanted reads a lot like what a slasher film would look on paper. The story starts off in Tibet, where a small child is sacrificed in an unexplained ritual involving a mysterious amulet. The story fast-forwards to the present, where a member of an excavation team discovers the amulet and ends up selling it to a woman. In true slasher film fashion, this woman just happens to be one of the counselors of a rehabilitation center for troubled youths. Well, it doesn’t take long before the amulet takes over the woman’s body and starts to prey on the kids, one by one. How many kids survive? How high will the body count be? And will anyone come to the rescue of these kids, Unwanted?

I applaud the efforts of writers Diablo and Mark Michaels. I am always impressed by anyone puts for effort into creating their own comic. This comic is no doubt self-published and has at least five issues worth of content in this trade, a massive undertaking for any writer or artist who decides to head down this path. The concept in itself is also pretty sound. I can picture is on the big screen as a movie with huge sequel potential but that is pretty much all it has going for it.

The writing hurts the book but that mostly has to do with the word balloons and its placement. In some scenes it was to figure who was saying what and dialogue repeatedly cuts of in mid sentence and heads into another word balloon. Now I have personally never seen this done before in a comic but so I did not know how quickly it takes a book out of its element. It is turns you off from a comic book real quick. The dialogue also has its share of problems, from run on sentences to lines that just does not work well on paper.

The art by Juan Romero is average. Some of the action scenes were not laid out as clear as it could have been. The biggest problem for me was the character designs. There were just too many of the characters, especially the male ones, that looked alike. In one instance, a character that I had thought was a woman was in fact a man. With no mention of the character’s name, I had no idea until midway into the book itself. The art does have some potential but it is just not quite there yet.

While there are bright spots to The Unwanted, particularly the concept, the overall execution of the book is a bust. The dialogue is not enticing enough and the art is still in its infancy. Though good news for the creative team, all of their problems could be easily fixed with practice and paying more attention to the overall process of comic bookmaking. With some hard work, I think this creative team will feel far from Unwanted in the future.