cover image Oscar Martin’s Solo: The Survivors of Chaos

Oscar Martin’s Solo: The Survivors of Chaos

Oscar Martin, trans. from the Spanish by Pau Rodriguez. Titan Comics, $29.99 (64p) ISBN 978-1-78276-334-5

Martin, a Spanish cartoonist of European Disney and Tom & Jerry comics, delivers a warrior treatment of the latter in this saga of a burly muscled rodent fighting through a Mad Max–style world. Solo’s postapocalyptic landscape is populated with warring tribes of animals: scavenger weasels, devil dogs, shadowed black cats, and his own species, a tribe of intelligent, overgrown rats hiding in caves and reduced to a primitive society. These animals coexist uneasily with duplicitous humans, and Solo is rat-napped into an all-species gladiator games before finally finding the happiness and family the wanderer aches for. Martin’s art enlivens the survival story with an animated, cartoony style depicting wide-eyed anthropomorphized creatures. The fantastic anatomy of bipedal animals is smooth and natural, and with fluent, energetic tiered panels of fighting action. Muted but robust coloring depicts the tan and brown of an endless scorching desert, subtle grays and whites of a blizzard winter (occasionally splashed with scarlet blood), and black skies ripped with sharper grays on a rainy night. This is the first of Martin’s series of tales of warrior vermin translated for an English-reading audience, and his mythos holds the promise of standing alongside Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo or Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (Jan.)