Advance Review: ‘Ordinary Gods’ #1 Is Not A Typical Comic

Writer Kyle Higgins provides a strong script for the main story. While writer Jana Quinn provides a strong prose back-up story that adds to the main narrative. Arguably Quinn does slightly better at characterization than Higgins. However, that is probably due to Higgins having to rely on artist Felipe Watanabe to interpret his characterization. Though Watanabe does a great job with assisting with characterization it is the subtle sense of movement that Watanabe excels at. Speaking of excelling; colorist Frank William shows tremendous skill with creating lighting and applying shading. Letterer Clayton Cowles does an amazing job there are typos in both stories that certain readers will incorrectly blame Cowles for.

Designer/editor Michael Busuttil brings some originality to how this issue looks. Busuttil particularly succeeds by evoking legendary stories such as The Odyssey (8th century BCE) and the mystery Rashomon (1950). The former occurs with the layout of the issue, especially the double pages that break off in uneven ways. However, Busuttil does apparently fail with the indicia saying the title is issue 6 of a different series. At least it does on the review copy. Also Busuttil fails to give all the cover artists credit on this issue. Instead one has to look for a website that provides links to special retailer only covers as well as the other covers.

Those who receive proper credit for covers are artists Felipe Watanabe, Declan Shalvey, Rod Reis, Nicola Scott, Dave Johnson, Tula Lotay, Dan Panosian, and colorist Matt Wilson. They all do a nice collaborative cover featuring their various styles  with coloring by Wilson (which has a foil variant available from retailer ComicSketchArt). Separately each of these artists create a historical character cover with a singular background color. Each of the covers looks great in term of design and line work. Yet, the limitation of each of the covers apparently being only available from a select retailer, respectively, seems rather financially wasteful.

Those who do not receive proper credits are artists Ivan Tao, Chris Ehnot, Yoshi Yoshitani, Tiago Da Silva, and Suspirialand. Tao, Da Silva, and Ehnot also have Virgin, or textless, versions of their variant covers. The three most unique cover designs are arguably those of Tao, Yoshitani, and Suspirialand. While the most generic design is arguably Chris Ehnot’s due to the characterization and coloring. That said all of them show impressive levels of detail and depth.

Ordinary Gods #1 sees release on Wednesday July 7th, 2021 from Image Comics.