Resistance Comic Lurches Into Second Issue

I so want to like this mini-series, based as it is on my favourite video game from the recent past... and yet it just seems Hell-bent on under-delivering!

With a $3.99 US cover price, I'd really like to get more out of a lead story than 15 pages that can be summed up as: soldiers and sailors on battleship get attacked (by what I assume is a Kraken, from my playing of the game itself) and have to bail after the creature sinks their craft, only to begin trekking across land and have to deal with a Chimera with a cloaking device (was that a Chameleon, from the game? I can't really tell, but I didn't think it was). They kill the thing and examine his apparatus before moving on again.

And that's about it. No frame of reference is given (Where are they? What's their mission? What's special about them?) Oh, sure, there's the odd little character bit like the fact that one of their group is writing a letter to his mother that they all know will never see the light of day (and he, in fact, takes a bullet through the noggin while working on it) but it honestly took me all of about 3 minutes to read. And, as was the case with the first issue, pretty much nothing is explained... It almost reads like somebody had a World War II story in them that they were dying to tell and so they took the non-plot points of it and turned it into a Resistance "tale."

The 6-page backup once again follows the life of the English lad from # 1 who suddenly abandons his minor life of crime after news arrives that his older brother has died in battle against the Chimera in France. Yawn!

As with so many of the so-called "decompressed" comics of the last decade, I'd really love to have been the editor on this series and been able to hand each of the scripts (so far) back to the writer with the instruction, "Imagine that this was going to be the first comic book that I ever read. Imagine further that your job, as the creator of this piece of fiction, was to provide such a thrill-ride of suspense, wonder and enticement that, upon reading it, I would be, at worst, incapable of resisting the urge to track down the next issue, and at best, turned into a comic fan for life. When you've got that script ready, come on back. Until then, your job's not done."

Instead, what we've got is a comic series that, after two issues, I can only in good conscience recommend to the die-hardiest of Resistance: Fall of Man and Resistance 2 fans, and only if you can further spare the $3.99 entrance fee without feeling any pain whatsoever.