Babyteeth #1 Review

That's the Tooth!

Writer: Donny Cates
Artist: Garry Brown
Publisher: Aftershock Comics
Release Date: June 7, 2017
Cover Price: $3.99

With Donny Cates and Garry Brown’s Babyteeth we have my first foray into Aftershock Comics. A pretty new publisher, launching in 2015, that seems to comprise of mostly Hollywood and Movie executives behind it. With that in mind it would make me assume that Aftershock is mostly looking to launch properties that can eventually lead to movies or other opportunities.
We start off with the main character Sadie Ritter, as she sits in a dark exterior attempting to record a video message. She fills us in on the premise of Sadie leaving a message for her baby as she goes back to tell the baby of the events leading up to the intro. She begins with her in highschool on June 7th 2017, a detail that I actually like as the release date of the comic itself, as she is approached by some highschool jocks. It seems Sadie’s sister is known to have some sort of product and wanting a hook-up.

Of course going quickly to bullying, one of the jocks decides to take what Sadie is reading and tease her about it, but ends up learning a secret that Sadie had been working to hide, the fact that she is pregnant. Sadie’s sister makes a heroic and badass entrance as she storms in driving her truck straight up to the tree this is taking place under only for it to be interrupted by an earthquake and Sadie going into labor.

This intro works fine enough but it moves very quickly and it’s hard not to look at this as almost a storyboard for a movie or tv pilot. Where usually in a comic you would just get an intro through dialogue box as it shows more of the character in the flashback, instead we see somewhat pointless panels of seeing her in the future first and then leading into the flashback, when usually seeing her in the future would just be saved for the end.

As the two are on their way to the hospital we get a little insight to their relationship and some hints toward what the relationship with their parents is. While this is going on it seems that every time Sadie has a contraction it’s followed with an earthquake along with the realization that it wasn’t Sadie’s water that broke, but she is in fact bleeding. We eventually get to the hospital and get some exposition as the baby, named Clark after Superman, is born that tells us flat out that he is seen as the antichrist and does have future enemies.

I actually really liked the detail of the baby being named Clark, but again it felt like something we would more see in a movie rather than another comic. We get some lackluster cliffhangers that are mostly ruined by the start of the comic, but we do get some hints of upcoming conflicts from future exposition.

Overall I like the premise of this book as possibly a modern Omen with more external consequences from the birth of an anti-christ, but it ends up falling short due to very little happening. I feel that very little happens because of how the story is structures, this issue seems like the intro of a movie or a TV Pilot and we just got the slimmed down version for a first issue. There’s premise and threads here that are interesting but it’s not presented in a way that pulls you in. You leave the issue knowing little more than what is given by just looking at the cover.

Bits and Pieces:

Interesting premise and story threads, but due to being what feels like a slimmed down TV pilot it’s presented in a way that doesn’t really do much beyond the cover or synopsis. This could go somewhere interesting, but we get no real idea of that in this first issue.

6.0/10