Unit 44: Alterna Giant 1

GIBSON: Wait a sec.. we still have an off-site storage unit?

HATCH: You mean the one that holds the cosmos cannons, the Roswell corpses, and one hundred other government secrets that wouldn't fit into one of our underground bunkers? YES. You have been paying the rent bill, right?

GIBSON: HRM. Well... you see... Hatch...

AUCTIONEER: Going once... going twice... SOLD!!!

If that doesn't make you chuckle there's something wrong. 

And yes, a common storage shed.

Yes, Area 51 put over a hundred top secret things into common. Freaking. Storage. Shed.

Okay, look, I belly laughed at that exchange. A tear may have been shed. Nobody, ever, in any part of the government, has ever had that type of conversation. Ever. Nope. Never happened. The sheer incompetence here is so normal in a real government setting, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash without the "Area 51" in there. I hope they don't actually have those kinds of discussions there but... well... they probably do.

And yes, the comic only gets better from there. Special agents Gibson and Hatch then bumble their way through  a plot decades in the making, as old grievances come to light. And I laughed my ass off at practically every page of this 96 page craziness. For five bucks I laughed and laughed and laughed. This is well written, really freaking clever. It's subversive without being disrespectful and cruel without being perversely so. It takes work to be this simple when writing. There's parts of this story where I could almost viscerally feel the restraint on display: tell the story, tell the joke, and that's it. Wes Locher, the writer, probably was up to his eyeballs in jokes that he removed from the script because they just would have distracted. My hat's off to him.

The art normally wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but I REALLY liked the story-telling chops. Everything is more than clear, more than easy to read: in some cases the layouts are just absolutely inspired. Yes, I used that word. Yes I meant it. @ me. Go ahead. The layouts are really well done. I can absolutely read every page of this without even needing to squint to check it.

Okay I lied, there's one page in the ninety-six I found confusing. One. Sorry about that. So 95 of the 96 pages I found to be pristinely laid out. Not absolutely all of them.

I think the thing that really sold me, though, was that both Locher and Jimenez actually gave a crap about the characters themselves. This would have been a really easy premise to screw up. Something this simple would have been easy to phone in; the utmost care is necessary to make sure each character feels right. And that happens here. Gibson and Hatch are just the right amounts of zany and serious, thoughtful and dumb. Again, I feel like there's just whole reams of character work sitting in Locher's writing room, with Jimenez having an equal amount of character sketches. I don't know if that's the case, but I sure can sense mastery of craft.

Unit 44’s first Giant collection is flat out hilarious and well-drawn. This is one of those rare acts of restraint that can only be done by someone who has done the work. Each part is deliberately placed. It's not too much, at any point, but just right. There's very few things I just outright recommend, but this one it's easy to do so. Unit 44 is absolutely worth your time. It certainly was mine.