From Image Comics, Michael Moreci, JM Ringuet, Axel Medellin, Jim Campbell, Sean Dove, and Steve Seeley.

For those of you that don’t know, staff writer Rob loves the paranormal.  Watches the shows, reads the books, does some investigating of his own.  So when I saw this comic coming out I suggested he give it a try.  And he hated it.  So I gave it a try.  I didn’t hate it, and didn’t love it either.  It took some thinking, and some fringe science ideas, in order to explain my feelings.  Time travel is necessary, because this is not a good zero issue.  It would be fine as 30 or 40 or 60 (50 being an “anniversary” issue in comics).  However it doesn’t feel like a good introduction.

The Hoax Hunters consist of three people:  Ken Cadaver (although it could be Cadayer, or that’s just a random spot on the page), Regan and Jack (which is the only other name used, so I’ll assume its his name).  Ken might be dead, Regan has some sort of electrical based powers and Jack is James Bond.  The team has been together for awhile and by the end of the book they gain a new team member, Murder the scarecrow astronaut.

The astronaut is one of the cooler ideas in recent memory.  Great idea, great visual, and an outlandish origin but hey its comics.  In comics we expect crazy ideas but we also expect some sort of ground work to be laid and ideas to escalate.  There is no escalation here.  We are meant to accept that a paranormal reality show has a zombie, Firestarter and a super soldier on their team.  They investigate the strange and odd which somehow includes rips in the universe.  With nothing already established, as it is a zero issue, all of these ideas seem  scatter shot.  X-Files and Fringe started out as strange thing of the week shows that later grew into bigger ideas and grander conspiracies.  After the first episodes, after seasons of work.  A show cant chase werewolves and come up with a unified string theory in the same hour.  It doesn’t work, and the first issue of this comic doesn’t work either.

Its a comic that’s trying to be too much all at once.  I am all for all of the crazy ideas inside this issue, but not in one issue.  This is a buffet of concepts but in the end it doesn’t satisfy my need for a good story.