For their follow up to The Last Sheriff, Reckless Hero’s Chris Jenkins and Chris Imber have gone for a tale that better fits their bombastic ’90s video game inspired visuals with mercenary team book Operation Boom!

Publisher: Reckless Hero
Writer: Chris Imber
Artist: Chris Imber (Pencils) Chris Jenkins (Colouring, Lettering)
Price: £1.99 from ComiXology

Our Rating: [star rating=”3.5″]

In Operation Boom, artist Chris Imber takes on writing duties and has created a high octane team book that perfectly shows off his action-packed art style with plenty of forced perspective and panel popping poses. Our heroes are a group of mercenaries who are sent on a mission by a mysterious government agency to take down super villain The Gentleman after he nicks some top secret tech from a shadowy bunker.

It’s not the most in-depth of stories and we spend much of the first issue being introduced to our team of heroes and their origins thanks to a series of bombastic back story pages.

They’re a motley bunch, from grizzled leader the Captain to the mysterious masked Mr Udo and sharpshooter Saryn, however the star of the show is Kidd – a paraplegic tech genius whose wheelchair is a tank! The characters look and feel like they have stepped out of a ’90s Capcom game and these intros feel very video gamey in feel. However it also means they feel slightly derivative with Boom especially feeling like a Streetfighter copy.

As with Last SherrifI Imber’s style is evocative of ’90s artists like Joe Mad and while the detail and quality he manages is fantastic for an indie book (with Jenkins colours and lettering making the pages leap out at you even more) it suffers with direct comparison and lacks some of the craft you might hope for based on first impressions – Captain’s cap has a particular mind of it’s own compositionally as does the Gentleman head – which takes away from what should be a rip-roaring action-packed read and the centerpiece for the Reckless Hero roster!