COMIC BOOK REVIEW: Bitter Root #1 (Image Comics)

Welcome back Comic Book Junkies. It's the Frog Queen here and today I'm reviewing BITTER ROOT #1 which is published by Image Comics. BITTER ROOT is written by David F. Walker of POWER MAN and IRON FIST  with Chuck Brown of TRENCH COATS, CIGARETTES AND SHOTGUNS. The comic is illustrated by Sanford Greene who is also from POWER MAN and IRON FIST. I actually really like it when creative teams who work together in the big two successfully, actually branch out to creator owned comics and bring us something that's all their own. There are also a series of variant covers by Brittney Williams, Denys Cowan and Mike Mignola.

Bitter Root #1 was published November 14th and it's intended for a mature audience. The story takes place in the 1920's and centers on the Sangerye Family who are trying to save the world from the supernatural terror which threatens to consume New York first. The reader knows this threat only as the Jinoo. Although Google tells me Jinoo is a made up word, I dunno if google is being willfully ignorant here, one can draw the conclusion that Jinoo is another word for Djinn that date back to pre-Islamic mythologies.

From what the Image website tells me, the first story arc of BITTER ROOT is slated to be 4 issues in length. They refer to this as the first story arc which generally means the series will continue depending on sales.

As far as first issues go, not a whole lot is given to us. It appears our focus is on a female character who's got her heart set on physically fighting the Jinoo while her family pushes her into a less violent role. She's given the task of grinding a special root which is administered to the Jinoo. We don't get to know much else about the characters as they have a brief interaction of just a few pages and then some action. We are also introduced to another more mysterious set of characters with even less insight into who they are or exactly their motives.

From the cover, one would assume that the Jinoo are vampires and although some are vampyric in appearance on the cover, reading further into issue 1 will have you feeling otherwise. I'm honestly not sure at all how I feel about this series. I do feel overwhelmed by the introduction of so many characters despite the fact that there was SOME meaningful interaction and the main characters are pretty cool. The headstrong female lead is a bit tiresome but I like the rest of her family. As for the art, I'm really into the coloring of the entire comic although the characters do feel a bit goofy most of the time and that so far doesn't make this feel like a horror comic but maybe it's not supposed to be?

Well I think that's it for this review, something fun I wanted to start doing was to tell you what music I listened to while reading the comic and  for this one I listened Samavaya- Vatan (2018)  which seemed to actually go quite well with this one. Warning if you don't like Maynard from Tool you're not likely to enjoy this because the lead singer very much sounds like him.

Check out my video review to see some of the artwork: