We Stand On Guard #1

If you have been living in a hole in the ground for the past 15 years you may not know who Brian K Vaughan is. To fill you in, Vaughan is one of my favorite writers. His creation Saga, an intergalactic space opera, is hailed as one of the best current ongoing series in comics. He was also the writer responsible for Y: The Last Man. If you have not read these books, go get them and read them immediately. They are both excellent reads. But for now, let’s move on to We Stand On Guard.

(Spoilers Ahead)

The Book opens up in Canada in 2112. The US is being bombed by an unknown source, as a Canadian family watch the news reports together. All of a sudden, we’re in the middle of a US retaliation bombing of Ontario. The bombings kill the mom and dad. Then we jump ahead a dozen or so years.
Amber (the little girl from the family) is out walking through the great white north, when she is attacked by this large American dog mech. Fortunately, Canada’s “Two-Four” are on the scene. They Save amber from the mech. Who are the Two-Four? The Two-Four are a force of Canadian civilian freedom fighters, and they seem to be pretty bad ass.

The Two-Four are helping Amber by patching her up and combing the area for more americans, when a giant 3 story tall gorilla mech shows up. Fortunately, the Two-Four have trained for this, so they are able to make quick work of the mech. What they have not trained for, is the american soldier piloting this mech.
Some members of the Two-Four are suspicious of Amber and think she may be a spy.  She should kill the soldier. While they are arguing over the morality of making someone kill who isn’t a killer, etc… Amber takes matters into her own hands and kills the solder.

This book is 40+ pages long, so we get a little more story than we would in a typical 20 page comic. We’re able to get a pretty good look into who Amber is.

Also, the art is really great in this issue. I love the design of the animalistic mechs. Steve Skroce does an excellent job with the covers and the interior of this book.

I want to learn more about this war torn Canadian future. So I will be visiting book two very soon.

So in conclusion, a new story by Vaughan is pretty exciting to me. There are just so many possibilities on where he could take us in this story, so in giving this one a rating, I may be rating on the possibilities of what the story could be as opposed to the first issue. I did enjoy issue #1 quite a bit though.

So, We Stand on Guard gets 8 out of 10 jalapeños.