Rough Riders #3 - AfterShock Comics

ROUGH RIDERS No. 3, June 2016

Whilst “Aftershock Comics” probably did enjoy “an explosive first year of publications with series featuring compelling new concepts and excellent comics talent”, Issue Three of “Rough Riders” arguably wasn’t one of the company’s finest products during this period due to Adam Glass’ somewhat disappointing decision to reveal the menace behind the U.S.S. Maine’s destruction as having a distinctly extra-terrestrial element to it. Admittedly, there’s little realism to a narrative based upon “a young Theodore Roosevelt” teaming up with Harry Houdini, Annie Oakley, Jack Johnson and Thomas Edison to begin with, and the title had already potentially ‘suggested’ an alien threat is at hand with the top-secret photograph portraying the American naval vessel’s demise uncannily imitating a scene from H.G. Wells’ novel “War Of The Worlds”. But that still doesn’t mean the graphic novelist’s portrayal of “Little Miss Sure Shot” being overpowered by a military delegate inhabited by an oversized multi-tentacled Martian earwig is the most palatable explanation behind Spain’s supposed new weapon…

Indeed, all the good non-fantasy-based ground work the author achieves during this twenty-page periodical’s earlier plot concerning Houdini and Johnson identifying “that something is happening up in those hills” by talking to the local prostitutes, as well as Edison’s evident non-acceptance that the aging scientist is going deaf, is debatably completely undermined by the purple-coloured wriggling monstrosity, which seems far more suited to the 1982 science fiction motion picture “Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan” than a western yarn where “things take a turn for the deadly.” Certainly, it must have been hard for this comic’s 5,440 readers to correlate the outlandish creepy-crawly squirrelling out from inside a Spaniard's ear with the magazine’s surprising cliff-hanger featuring the mad Russian monk Rasputin; “You are mistaken, comrade. I am not your friend… I am Rasputin… And you will bow to me!”

Fortunately, what “Give Them Hell” does contain is the excellent pencilling of Patrick Olliffe, whose opening sequence of the future United States President donning his Brooks Brothers-made Colonel’s uniform is alone worth the cover price of this tome. In fact, the “veteran comic book illustrator with over twenty-five years of experience”, whose dynamically-story-boarded race through a trap-infested jungle trail does a superb job of capturing a headlong flight from danger, is likely to have been the main reason behind why there was such “building interest in the book” in June 2016...

Creator & Writer: Adam Glass, Artist: Patrick Olliffe, and Colorist: Gabe Eltaeb