It seems that every week there’s another step in the direction of digital comics distribution as the main (or at least a more substantial) means of getting non-Big Two, non-superhero work out into the marketplace, and this week, Mark Waid and John Rogers have taken that to the next level with the launch of Thrillbent, which went live yesterday with Insufferable #1 by Waid and longtime Irredeemable collaborator Peter Krause. At the same time, Matt Kindt‘s MIND MGMT, which will officially launch both digitally and in print on May 23, saw the release yesterday of MIND MGMT: Secret Files, a digital one-shot that serves as a prequel or primer to the upcoming series from Dark Horse.MIND MGMT, when Kindt talked to ComicBook.com about it, was described as a book that would function differently digitally versus print, with a lean toward print. there will be extra features in the printed issues, as well as an overall physical look and feel that will make the paper copies something that fans of the series will prefer. This digital-only opening chapter, then, will likely appear in some collected edition. It’s also still set up as though somebody took a normal comic book and scanned it into a computer.Fans of Kindt’s remarkable work like 3 Story and Revolver will undoubtedly enjoy MIND MGMT. His art style is loose and casual enough to make the reader think, “I could do that,” which is a great quality to have as it makes the work approachable. But it’s also clean and technically proficient. Readers looking to test their theory would likely discover that, like the work of Cliff Chiang, DC Animated Universe or other works that fall more to the iconic than realistic side of Scott McCloud’s pyramid, it isn’t as easy to reproduce as it looks.The story itself is something like the old Charles Bronson picture Telefon, which revolved around Russian sleeper agents buried so deep in American culture that even they didn’t know they were undercover. Revived for action by a keyphrase, they took to killing their targets. The difference? Both the Russian and American agents featured in MIND MGMT do their killing with mental powers, and much of the story revolves around a woman who got a “data dump” from one of the operatives in the moments preceding his death.Ultimately it’s an enjoyable short story with some terrific art, which looks to lead into a promising series. Next week, and then the week after that, there will be more free chapters leading up to the release of MIND MGMT #1. Sign up for Dark Horse Digital and pick them up, as this series has huge potential for greatness.
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