Canto #1 (A Family Comic Friday Extra!)

Some weeks there’s so much great stuff that you can’t contain it in one review! I wish that was the case for this week’s Family Comic Friday Extra. Instead, life got in the way and I got behind on my comic book readings. But that’s okay. Because there’s still time to jump on the bandwagon of what is a candidate for my pick for all-ages comic book of the year: Canto!

Canto #1
Written by David M. Booher
Art by Drew Zucker
Published by IDW Publishing
Pages: 32
Retail: $3.99

Canto’s people are slaves. Their hearts have been replaced with clocks. Not allowed to have a name or fall in love nor own possessions, our hero’s people are reduced to little more than replaceable parts of a bigger machine of servitude and cruelty. See, for when the time stops on the clocks of these slaves, they are thrown into a furnace to power and warm the domiciles of the enslavers.

Canto is different from the rest. For one, he has a name. Then there’s the fact that Canto is in love with another; a little girl made of tin. He even gifts her tiny shiny pebbles as a token of his love. When the slavers do discover the secrets of Canto, they seek to make an example of someone who dares to buckle their repressive system. In another act of love, the girl throws herself at the villains and her clock is severely damaged.

In order to save the one he loves and hopefully overthrow his oppressors, Canto must embarked on a solo journey. One that promises action, thrills and possibly an unlocked secret or two!

Canto is visually stunning! Skybreaker’s Drew Zucker did a phenomenal job on these pages. I’m itching to discover what Canto and his people really look like underneath those helmets!
While Drew Zucker blew me away with his vision of this far off land, he couldn’t have done it without writer David M. Booher (Powerless). He does something that only a very few can and that is to create not just an entire world but a whole universe. Though we only witness a tiny portion of Canto’s world, through Booher’s narrative, I feel like there are distant planets teeming with life somewhere in our hero’s galaxy.

I absolutely loved this opening chapter. It was so fanciful. Canto is supposed to be inspired by the Wizard of Oz and the fantasy works of Jim Henson. Yet this book really was unlike anything I have ever read before. I only hated that it ended too soon! Thankfully, I won’t have to wait long as issue #2 is set to debut later this month!

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 10 out of 10 stars.

Canto #1 currently available in print at a comic book store near you as well as certain digital formats.

This review was concurrently published on Outrightgeekery.com.