Book-A-Day 2014 #50: The Advance Team by Pfeiffer & Torres

For the first big round number of Book-A-Day 2014, I have for you...a decent graphic novel from two years ago that doesn't set high expectations but meets them. (Hey, it's been a long, tough day: I worked my first conference with the Finance team today, in the lovely Marriott Marquis New York, so it's already late and my energy is dangerously low.)

Some stories are called comic-booky, because they're quintessentially comics. (Although there are other media that work in the same style: Syfy Channel movies, for one.) This is exactly in that mode, a big chunk of entertainment cheese with large lumps of wish-fulfillment, audience-pleasing violence, and familiar genre furniture. This particular chunk is called The Advance Team, and it was written by Will Pfeiffer and drawn by German Torres -- neither of whom has anything to be ashamed of here, but neither of which is going to win an award for this work, either.

Zack McKinley is your typical twentysomething slacker: working as a pizza delivery boy, pining for the cute phone girl Vic, going nowhere. But he secretly has vast and unspecified superpowers -- vaguely in the brick style -- which pop up early in the story during an altercation with muggers and then are explained by his crazy "uncle" Archie. You see, there's a fiendish alien invasion underway, and only Zack can stop it...with extreme force!

The Advance Team isn't surprising or new, but it is fun and entertaining, particularly if you have a taste for big summer movies. (This could yet become one; it has all of the right elements.) I won't explain the plot any further, since a book like this is all plot, and that's the point of reading it.

If you like things like this, this is the kind of thing you'll like. It's done highly professionally and with gusto, and it makes enough sense while reading that you won't feel compelled to pick nits. That's about all it aims for, so I have to give it full marks.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index