It fits right in with the current and ever-growing comic canon. Characters are rendered with heroic builds, emoting and gesturing with pomp and circumstance, giving Trace War an air of respectability. Pelletier's art is emblematic of his earlier work on Marvel and DC titles. Much of Trace War's appeal is thanks to its art style - a combination of Pelletier's intricately detailed faces and environments, inker Andrew Hennessy's smooth, bold lines, and colorist David Garcia Cruz's fresh take on what would have otherwise been an overused and dull palette. Compared to the impressive world-building and fight sequences, the lengthy exposition reads as telling rather than showing.

Some of the social commentary feels well-intentioned but ham-fisted, with the villainous Freelanders being thinly veiled analogs for the American far-right. Still, Garvin sometimes relies on some overused tropes, especially in this first issue. The narrative style in Trace War reads like a video game playthrough, with action sequences interspersed throughout. Garvin demonstrates an excellent sense of world, scale, and setting, as befits his background in video games. It taps into the hot topics of the current times, such as social unrest, climate change, intrusive tech, and rampant misanthropy.Īt first glance, Trace War could be dismissed as a generic entry into a stale and overdone genre, but this would be a mistake. Trace War has all the trappings of the epic dystopian genre, following the likes of long-form examples like The Walking Dead and The Last Of Us -the latter of which Liithos Entertainment's CEO Michael Mambauer is quite familiar with.

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