Codename: Black Death

(Triumph, 2006)
™ and © 2006 Triumph Media Entertainment

In North Korea, a squadron of soldiers is united by a shared experience that will change their lives forever. Years later they’ve gone their separate ways, but they haven’t forgotten that day. So when something known as the Skate Project brings them together again, it’s not surprising that they look to each other when tragedy strikes. There are certain situations for which lessons learned in the military come in handy…

This is a fairly straightforward super-hero/action-adventure yarn: Man seeks revenge on killers and comes into possession of high-tech suit. The series is part of a new line of super-hero comics.

— Andy Richardson

From the Comics Buyers’ Guide:

Codename: Black Death serves as the inaugural title from fledgling Triumph, and company co-founder Steve Zinngrabe has put together a story that entertains and offers hope for future issues. Specifically, Zinngrabe has taken a slew of action-adventure comic-book clichés—character with top-secret military background seeks vengeance and uses his buddy’s new prototype wicked-kewl hi-tech super-suit to exact said vengeance—and made the story more than the sum of its parts.

For example, the super-suit is actually spare parts left over from the process to create the suit, and the suit’s creator is hardly a buddy of the protagonist. Another pleasant surprise is that the suit’s creator—a minor part of the story—is portrayed as a sympathetic character instead of the usual dunderheaded idjit. He is a dunderheaded idjit at times, but he’s a sympathetic one.

The art by El Dazo (whose name in English translates to “El Dazo”) is good enough, though it won’t win awards. Regardless, the illustrations make it easy to understand the story, with such minimal exceptions as the fact that a few of the characters look like identical twins, even when they’re not related.

Fans of indie action comics should check out this one.

— Ray Sidman

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