I’m just gonna call it : Victor Martinez’s cover for All-Time Comics : Blind Justice #1 (the fourth release in this Josh and Samuel Bayer-helmed project) is the coolest thing to date about this entire enterprise. Rendered in a style highly reminiscent of old-school airbrushing (hell, it may even be a piece of old-school airbrushing for all I know), it’s atmospheric, evocative, and just plain bad-ass.

Too bad the interior contents can’t live up to the dramatic standard it sets.

Not that it’s a bad comic, mind you — more just another very mixed bag from a series that excels at creating them. The premise is agreeably absurd : a patient at an Optic City psychiatric facility who appears to be more or less comatose is actually the bandaged, club-wielding vigilante known as Blind Justice (or maybe it’s simply “Justice,” since that’s what most folks seem to call him, and there’s no indication that he’s actually, ya know, blind), a kind of unstoppable, and probably un-killable, force of righteous vengeance who has a habit of leaping into action whenever the fetching female assistant director of the hospital’s life is in danger. Which it is, this time, when she and her boss head off for some isolated island to help the poor and downtrodden locals only to find themselves set upon by a cult-like band of modern-day pirates with a vaguely martial and militaristic bent.

The script’s up and down in the extreme, with plot holes large enough to drive a truck through (not the least of which being how our “hero” manages to stow away aboard his lady-love’s ship), but that’s in line with the overall aesthetic here since the art’s all over the place, as well — inconsistent creative teams and “fill-in issues” were a mainstay of the “Bronze Age” these comics are meant to invoke, of course, but this book takes that notion to absurd heights by having scion of comics sub-royalty Rick Buckler Jr. doing most of the pencils, with late-game contributions from Bayer himself and Jason T. Miles, while Al Milgrom handles the bulk of the inks with Sabin Cauldron chipping in here and there in “deadline-crunch” fashion.

And if deliberately channeling the “deadline crunch” ethos is what the goal here was (hell, even the coloring chores are split between Alessandro Echevarria and Matt Rota — you can tell who did what due to Rota’s facility with Ben Day dots), then congratulations on a job well done are certainly due, but not being privy to such “inside baseball” knowledge, all I can say is — it looks and feels rushed and slopped-together at the last minute regardless of intent. There’s a cool double-page splash fight scene, it’s true, but some the figure drawings throughout are wildly inconsistent, and the same is true of a lot of the composition work and the comic’s overall sense, and use, of perspective — the only absolute “stand-by” from start to finish, in fact, is Rick Parker’s definition-of-solid lettering.

And ya know what? Even there we’ve got a wrinkle in the form of the “A. Machine” Charlton-style credits, which certainly give off the look of having been thrown in there right before the whole thing went to press. Which probably lends some weight to the idea that the “rush job” vibe here was intentional. If you choose to buy into that, then this comic’s a successful invocation of a very particular sort of dated industry mainstay and pretty fun, to boot. If you don’t, then the whole thing will likely just come off as a total mess.

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