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From critically acclaimed comic book writer Joshua Hale Fialkov (The Bunker, Echoes, and I, Vampire) and superstar artists Bernard Chang and Marcelo Maiolo (Green Lantern Corps, Batman Beyond) comes a postapocalyptic action/adventure comedy.
King just wants what anybody wants: not to get fired, eaten, or forced to mate with a cheetah lady. For Earth’s sole human survivor after the apocalypse, life among Los Angeles’s strange new populace ain’t easy. Working for the LA Department of Reclamation, King gets a lot of crappy jobs going on quests and searching for artifacts from the “old world,” which can range from the mythical (Excalibur!) to the absurd (an iPod shuffle—which, let’s be honest, was a terrible, terrible invention). The commute can be a real pain in the asphalt, too; the 405 freeway is filled with mutants, monsters, mayhem, and tentacled Elder Gods. And that’s all before you hit the horrors of the San Fernando Valley. As the world’s freakish inhabitants battle for supremacy, King searches for the “seed of life,” which may give Earth the second chance it probably doesn’t even deserve.
King just wants what anybody wants: not to get fired, eaten, or forced to mate with a cheetah lady. For Earth’s sole human survivor after the apocalypse, life among Los Angeles’s strange new populace ain’t easy. Working for the LA Department of Reclamation, King gets a lot of crappy jobs going on quests and searching for artifacts from the “old world,” which can range from the mythical (Excalibur!) to the absurd (an iPod shuffle—which, let’s be honest, was a terrible, terrible invention). The commute can be a real pain in the asphalt, too; the 405 freeway is filled with mutants, monsters, mayhem, and tentacled Elder Gods. And that’s all before you hit the horrors of the San Fernando Valley. As the world’s freakish inhabitants battle for supremacy, King searches for the “seed of life,” which may give Earth the second chance it probably doesn’t even deserve.
144 pages, Paperback
First published August 19, 2015
16 people are currently reading
326 people want to read
About the author
Joshua Hale Fialkov
444 books141 followersJoshua Hale Fialkov is the creator (or co-creator, depending) of graphic novels, including the Harvey Nominated Elk’s Run, the Harvey and Eisner nominated Tumor, Punks the Comic, and the Harvey Nominated Echoes.
He has written Alibi and Cyblade for Top Cow, Superman/Batman for DC Comics, Rampaging Wolverine for Marvel, and Friday the 13th for Wildstorm. He’s writing the DC relaunch of I,Vampire, as well as debuting the new Marvel character The Monkey King. This fall sees the launch of The Last of the Greats from Image Comics with artist Brent Peeples.
He also served as a writer on the Emmy Award Nominated animated film Afro Samurai: Resurrection, and as Executive Producer of the cult hit LG15: The Resistance web series.
Elk’s Run, Tumor, and Alibi are all currently in development as feature films. He has written comics for companies including Marvel, Wildstorm, IDW, Dark Horse, Image, Tor Books, Seven Seas Entertainment, Del Rey, Random House, Dabel Brothers Productions, and St. Martin’s Press. He has done video game work for THQ, Midway Entertainment, and Gore Verbinski’s Blind Wink Productions. He also wrote a Sci-Fi Channel movie starring Isabella Rossellini and Judd Nelson. Unfortunately, at no point in the film does Judd Nelson punch the sky and freeze frame. Joshua grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, went to college in Boston, where he got a BFA in writing and directing for the stage and screen, and then worked in the New England film industry, until finally deciding to move to Los Angeles to do it properly. He lives with his wife, Christina, daughter, Gable, and their cats, Smokey and the Bandit.
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/joshfialkov
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/joshuahalefia...
Photograph by Heidi Ryder Photography
He has written Alibi and Cyblade for Top Cow, Superman/Batman for DC Comics, Rampaging Wolverine for Marvel, and Friday the 13th for Wildstorm. He’s writing the DC relaunch of I,Vampire, as well as debuting the new Marvel character The Monkey King. This fall sees the launch of The Last of the Greats from Image Comics with artist Brent Peeples.
He also served as a writer on the Emmy Award Nominated animated film Afro Samurai: Resurrection, and as Executive Producer of the cult hit LG15: The Resistance web series.
Elk’s Run, Tumor, and Alibi are all currently in development as feature films. He has written comics for companies including Marvel, Wildstorm, IDW, Dark Horse, Image, Tor Books, Seven Seas Entertainment, Del Rey, Random House, Dabel Brothers Productions, and St. Martin’s Press. He has done video game work for THQ, Midway Entertainment, and Gore Verbinski’s Blind Wink Productions. He also wrote a Sci-Fi Channel movie starring Isabella Rossellini and Judd Nelson. Unfortunately, at no point in the film does Judd Nelson punch the sky and freeze frame. Joshua grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, went to college in Boston, where he got a BFA in writing and directing for the stage and screen, and then worked in the New England film industry, until finally deciding to move to Los Angeles to do it properly. He lives with his wife, Christina, daughter, Gable, and their cats, Smokey and the Bandit.
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/joshfialkov
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/joshuahalefia...
Photograph by Heidi Ryder Photography
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 11, 2016
Los Angeles, sometime in the future. Humanity is extinct except for one dude: King, who works for the LA Department of Reclamation as a Hero/Adventurer. His mission? Find the Life Seed and save the world.
It’s easy to summarise the book like that but once you start looking closely at the detail you’ll notice the piss-poor job Joshua Hale Fialkov has done with basic things like establishing character motivation and world-building. How did the world end and why is it populated by mythical gods, humanoid animal mutants, dinosaurs, and sentient robots? No idea, it just is. What exactly will the Life Seed do and what does “saving the world” entail? No idea. Who established the Department of Reclamation and what’s up with these fantasy-themed job titles - “Hero/Adventurer”? Pass. Plain incompetent storytelling.
What Fialkov does well is make jokes about LA traffic that LA residents might get but anyone else won’t. I did like that the “LAPD” are a robotic religious cult of Terminator-types who attack with the chant, “It has a gun!”. It adds up to very little though.
The only positive about this comic is artist Bernard Chang whose recent run on Green Lantern Corps pays off with King. Both titles require him to draw dozens of imaginative otherworldly characters and whether he’s drawing karate robot bears, dinosaurs, gods or monsters, he’s doing good work.
But Chang’s art isn’t enough to save this mess of a comic. Fialkov flubs what could’ve been a fun series, instead creating a badly-written and clumsy storyline out of a generic “saving the world” setup - like much of his work King reads very poorly. Avoid this and anything else with this guy’s name on!
It’s easy to summarise the book like that but once you start looking closely at the detail you’ll notice the piss-poor job Joshua Hale Fialkov has done with basic things like establishing character motivation and world-building. How did the world end and why is it populated by mythical gods, humanoid animal mutants, dinosaurs, and sentient robots? No idea, it just is. What exactly will the Life Seed do and what does “saving the world” entail? No idea. Who established the Department of Reclamation and what’s up with these fantasy-themed job titles - “Hero/Adventurer”? Pass. Plain incompetent storytelling.
What Fialkov does well is make jokes about LA traffic that LA residents might get but anyone else won’t. I did like that the “LAPD” are a robotic religious cult of Terminator-types who attack with the chant, “It has a gun!”. It adds up to very little though.
The only positive about this comic is artist Bernard Chang whose recent run on Green Lantern Corps pays off with King. Both titles require him to draw dozens of imaginative otherworldly characters and whether he’s drawing karate robot bears, dinosaurs, gods or monsters, he’s doing good work.
But Chang’s art isn’t enough to save this mess of a comic. Fialkov flubs what could’ve been a fun series, instead creating a badly-written and clumsy storyline out of a generic “saving the world” setup - like much of his work King reads very poorly. Avoid this and anything else with this guy’s name on!
August 22, 2015
'King' by Joshua Hale Fialkov (The Bunker) with art by Berhard Chang and Marcelo Maiolo (Green Lantern Corps) is the first issue in a 5 part Kindle serial. I received the first part and it's short, but lots of fun.
You think you're morning commute to work is bad? Try the one King has. As the last living human in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles everything on his way to work is trying to kill him or eat him or stall him so they can win a bet and eat him. He works for the LA Department of Reclamation and his boss is also looking for a good reason to fire him (and possibly eat him). His job entails (sorry, pun intended) searching for useful and useless artifacts of the human world. The thing he most wants to find is the mythical "seed of life" which may give humans a second chance.
If the above didn't give you the idea that this is all loony fun, then I apologize. The fact that King bothers to go to work at all is pretty funny, and the weird monsters he meets along the way are funny in their own way, arguing with King as they try to eat him. The first issues gets off to a good start, then has an interesting ending.
I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Jet City Comics and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.
You think you're morning commute to work is bad? Try the one King has. As the last living human in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles everything on his way to work is trying to kill him or eat him or stall him so they can win a bet and eat him. He works for the LA Department of Reclamation and his boss is also looking for a good reason to fire him (and possibly eat him). His job entails (sorry, pun intended) searching for useful and useless artifacts of the human world. The thing he most wants to find is the mythical "seed of life" which may give humans a second chance.
If the above didn't give you the idea that this is all loony fun, then I apologize. The fact that King bothers to go to work at all is pretty funny, and the weird monsters he meets along the way are funny in their own way, arguing with King as they try to eat him. The first issues gets off to a good start, then has an interesting ending.
I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Jet City Comics and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.
February 1, 2018
King is the last human on Earth after an apocalypse-level event. He now lives among a score of races that rule the planet and want to rebuild it. His job is to find a Life Seed for this purpose. This is made more difficult by the dog-eat-dog world out there and his sister Queen who wants him dead. The humor really starts in the last half of the story, but it's worth a read if you have an hour to kill.
September 24, 2017
Cool Art & Story
The art really caught my eye. The story of a dystopian future with a woman as a savior kept my attention.
The art really caught my eye. The story of a dystopian future with a woman as a savior kept my attention.
October 7, 2016
Centuries after the apocalypse
in a L.A. that is only slightly weirder
that it is now
Filled with mutants ; intelligent dinosaurs
aliens ; Gods and a whole catalog of weird shit
King is just a guy trying to do his job
when the world tries to end around him
he has no choice but to save it
in a L.A. that is only slightly weirder
that it is now
Filled with mutants ; intelligent dinosaurs
aliens ; Gods and a whole catalog of weird shit
King is just a guy trying to do his job
when the world tries to end around him
he has no choice but to save it
March 5, 2017
Finally read it...
And I LOVED it. I want more. No, I need more of King and Roze. I don't know if there is more, but I'm about to check.
And I LOVED it. I want more. No, I need more of King and Roze. I don't know if there is more, but I'm about to check.
May 1, 2017
Alright. This is a weird one. King is a graphic novel set in a very distant post-apocalyptic future where humans are extinct (except for our protagonist, OBVIOUSLY) and the world is overrun with gross hybrid animals, giant robots, mythical creatures, dinosaurs, aliens....THERE REALLY ARE NO RULES HERE. We got maybe four pages of backstory in total. The book doesn't bother fleshing out anything--you just have to roll with it.
I didn't love this, honestly. It was poorly written. I felt like there was a lot of forced humor that was desperately trying to appeal to teenage boys. The story starts and ends abruptly and just doesn't have a well developed plot. There's a lot of futuristic slang which wouldn't bother me if it were consistent and seemed to make sense but it reeeally didn't?? Swear words in this world include normal things (hell, shit, dammit,) real words that aren't currently curse words (fallopian, motherfathers,) and then just complete nonsense words (farging, shazbot, zarquon, goiterbog, bastinado, blorking, borking.) This whole point about the slang is a fairly minor detail but I'm drawing it up to give a picture of how all over the place this book is.
It was a fast-paced and action-packed read and I did like the colorful and varied art but mostly there just wasn't very much substance here.
Thank you to the publisher for sending a copy in exchange for an honest review.
I didn't love this, honestly. It was poorly written. I felt like there was a lot of forced humor that was desperately trying to appeal to teenage boys. The story starts and ends abruptly and just doesn't have a well developed plot. There's a lot of futuristic slang which wouldn't bother me if it were consistent and seemed to make sense but it reeeally didn't?? Swear words in this world include normal things (hell, shit, dammit,) real words that aren't currently curse words (fallopian, motherfathers,) and then just complete nonsense words (farging, shazbot, zarquon, goiterbog, bastinado, blorking, borking.) This whole point about the slang is a fairly minor detail but I'm drawing it up to give a picture of how all over the place this book is.
It was a fast-paced and action-packed read and I did like the colorful and varied art but mostly there just wasn't very much substance here.
Thank you to the publisher for sending a copy in exchange for an honest review.
February 25, 2017
King, the last human on Earth, just wants what anybody wants: not to get fired, eaten, or forced to mate with a cheetah lady. Working for the LA Department of Reclamation, King gets a lot of crappy jobs going on quests and searching for artifacts from the “old world,” which can range from the mythical to the absurd. As the world’s freakish inhabitants battle for supremacy, King searches for the “seed of life,” which may give Earth the second chance it probably doesn’t even deserve.
This was just a fun series. King is an over the top adventurer in a world of strange beings. Half what to kill him and the other half want to kill him and then eat him. But he somehow manages to survive. The artwork is good,
This was just a fun series. King is an over the top adventurer in a world of strange beings. Half what to kill him and the other half want to kill him and then eat him. But he somehow manages to survive. The artwork is good,
October 15, 2015
I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This comic was OK. The artwork was decent and the story left on a pretty extreme cliffhanger. I realize it was just issue one of five but I wanted more to happen.
Our hero spent the first part of this issue battling his way through mutants (he’s the last human on Earth we’re told) to get to work. After he finally arrives, he is sent on a quest. The surprise for him was that he ended up trapped by his sister Queen.
Short and sweet, right? I’ve read a lot of comics where so much more happens even in such a short sample of the series. I really wanted to love this but it’s not too late. There are four more issues and I feel like the series is really going to pick up. If you have access to more issues than the first, go for it but don’t get stuck like me with just one issue.
3 stars.
(I will update this as I read future installments.)
This comic was OK. The artwork was decent and the story left on a pretty extreme cliffhanger. I realize it was just issue one of five but I wanted more to happen.
Our hero spent the first part of this issue battling his way through mutants (he’s the last human on Earth we’re told) to get to work. After he finally arrives, he is sent on a quest. The surprise for him was that he ended up trapped by his sister Queen.
Short and sweet, right? I’ve read a lot of comics where so much more happens even in such a short sample of the series. I really wanted to love this but it’s not too late. There are four more issues and I feel like the series is really going to pick up. If you have access to more issues than the first, go for it but don’t get stuck like me with just one issue.
3 stars.
(I will update this as I read future installments.)
November 5, 2016
How silly do you want your apocalypse? This is a tongue-in-cheek fast paced adventure in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, where King the last pure man on Earth, battles his way through bureaucracies and mutants and cult-member robots as he tries to protect the Seed, a MacGuffin that can restore the world, if he can only figure out what (or who) it is. The story moves fast, and the artwork is beautiful and insane with lots of fun details. The story's pretty shallow, but as it's basically there as a hook to hang the rest of the craziness on, it serves its purpose. There isn't a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, but there is so much that is over-the-top in so many ways that it makes for a quick, crazy fun read.
May 25, 2016
I received a collected edition from a giveaway on this site.
King was OK. I like the art. It's bright and clear, making the unexciting story more fun. The variety of character design is fun, but we never get to know much interesting about any of them, even the main characters. Motivations are a mystery. There were a couple of good laughs. The setting is interesting, and I think an interesting story could be told here if we understood more of what was going on.
King was OK. I like the art. It's bright and clear, making the unexciting story more fun. The variety of character design is fun, but we never get to know much interesting about any of them, even the main characters. Motivations are a mystery. There were a couple of good laughs. The setting is interesting, and I think an interesting story could be told here if we understood more of what was going on.
November 20, 2016
Tongue in cheek dark humor for grown-ups.
I'm a big fan of dystopian stories. I found myself enjoying the storyline of gods, aliens and the animal mutant mess of the entire worldscape this graphic novel puts before us.
I'm a big fan of dystopian stories. I found myself enjoying the storyline of gods, aliens and the animal mutant mess of the entire worldscape this graphic novel puts before us.
June 28, 2016
Phenomenal. Great story all around. Incredible artwork! A must own for any graphic novel/comicbook fan
November 13, 2016
The description says it's award-winning but I didn't find it terribly special. It certainly wasn't bad, but it wasn't inspiring or engrossing either.
January 4, 2017
Great mag, check it out.
Good read and beautiful art.
Good read and beautiful art.
June 7, 2017
Interesting story and plays on inside jokes about Los Angeles. Fun to read.
December 3, 2016
A fun end of the world read.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews