BRZRKR: Volume One

So this is the Keanu Reeves comic. That’s him prominently glowering on the cover, topped off with his John Wick hair styling (hey, it makes more sense, and is better marketing, than Neil Gaiman appearing as the Sandman). And that’s also Reeves with the lead writing credit. Though I don’t know how the duties were split between Reeves and co-writer Matt Kindt. This was Reeves’ first comic and Kindt is a vet.

Anyway, with Reeves being a hot property at the time it was a title that launched with a very successful Kickstarter campaign ($1.4 million) and it sold very well too. Of course, franchising wasn’t far behind and a film and anime series have both been announced. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

The Berserker (or Unute, which means weapon or tool in his ur-language) is a guy born 80,000 years ago, which is quite a ways back in terms of the evolution of modern humans. I mean, there’s no way he would have been born into an advanced tribal community like the one that’s shown here on that timeline, but I think we’re just playing around with Conan chronology. Anyway, if you’re wondering how the Big B has managed to live so long it’s because he’s the hybrid child of a human mother and maybe a god – a god who takes the form of a charge of electricity, with the moment of conception being a coital zap. When baby Unute grows up he becomes a killing machine, massacring all the enemies of his tribe and then continuing to be an ultimate, unkillable warrior down through the centuries. Or millennia.

Most of this book (collecting issues 1-4) is flashback, with the story being told by Unute to a doctor looking to unlock the secrets of the Berserker’s DNA and finding only “incongruous amino acids” and “quantum molecules” (science!). These flashbacks consist mainly of blood-soaked carnage. Unute has a thing for punching his fist right through people and tearing heads off. He even rips a horse’s head off at one point. Guts and gore are splattered everywhere, in battle scenes that recalled those in 300 only with more splatter. The Berserker himself even gets torn apart and shot up with arrows and spears and bullets, but his super healing power lets him recover quickly.

That healing power is just one of the clichés on display here, in what is a fairly conventional origin story that doesn’t have a lot of time for talk. And the character of the Berserker is also a bit dull: the warrior tired of violence who now only wants to die. 80,000 years is a long grind. Maybe they translated his name into a license plate for the title of the comic just to spice him up a bit.

But to give it its due, I thought this was a respectable kick-off. The art gets kind of slack when there’s no fighting (look at that drawing of the “undisclosed U.S. government facility”), but it really comes to life when Unute is kicking ass and tearing his enemies apart limb from limb or spattering their brain jelly all over his fists. I also got to the end thinking there was some potential here, especially if they could find a villain capable of matching Unute’s level of violence. The goal here was to leave readers wanting more, and in that respect they did their job.

Graphicalex