So today I got my hands on The Regulators, and interestingly enough, it’s almost similar to the Marvel universe in terms of gathering a team together to defeat a greater evil, except it dwells more into demons and angels. So let’s get down to the meat and gravy of what I thought about The Regulators.
The story, from what I can grasp, takes place in a post-demon war where angels and demons are trying to protect and destroy the world in their respective order. Super-humans are allied with the angels to defend the Earth from being taken over by an incoming army of demons.
I want to say the story is not very organized in terms of making it flow seamlessly. I had to puzzle the pieces together in order to make the story more understandable, and I’m also assuming there were previous issues that flushed out backgrounds for certain characters as well since they refer back to other comics that are still currently on sale.
With the constant jumping around in different times and spaces, it confuses the audience, and makes it difficult to really grasp what’s going on. The formula is very similar to Marvel’s way of introducing characters and backgrounds, but it doesn’t do it in a smooth way. The manner in which Marvel does it is that they do it in multitudes of movies, or in this case, comics, and they bring them all together instead of premiering all sorts of characters and backstory in one comic, which, denies their own respective spotlight and screen time.
Unfortunately, all the characters lack their own respective spotlights and none of them really get the time to get flushed out. I don’t personally have any attachments to any of the characters due to that lack of limelight. Some characters are very similar to the existing characters that are both in the Marvel and DC universes. The characters don’t feel unique nor do they really display what powers they have specifically. It’s almost like Dragon Ball Z where there are no more special techniques anymore and they all have super strength and energy beams.
This creates distance to each character and lack of attachment to every one of them, which will make the audience care a lot less about the characters in general and create less shock factor when they do meet their demise.
The action sequences and the art of them are pretty generic. The fights don’t last more than a page and it really dumbs down their individual abilities when it’s portrayed that way. I understand that they need to have time to talk about everything that’s happening and why certain things are happening, but it feels more of a narrative novel than it is a comic book when you are cheated out of the action and comic book art.
I feel the comic has potential, but it needs to flush out each individual character more, so that we feel and understand each character and can grow attached to them individually instead of as a whole. The art is great, but the action sequences need to be elongated where they can display the artist’s art style. Weaving together a story full of different characters needs time and pages in order to properly introduce their respective roles and abilities. This comic doesn’t do so very well, but hopefully in the future issues, it resolves some of the problems I had with this comic.
I would say I enjoyed the narratives, but would have loved it more if they had more pages dedicated to the action scenes rather than just having the one-pagers.
Have you had a chance to read the Regulators? Tell us what you thought in the comments or on Twitter!
