Mindfield Vol. 1

by J.T. Krul, Saleem Crawford (Inker), Alex Konat (Penciller)

Collects Issues #0 - 6! The CIA has created an elite team of telepathic agents dedicated to fighting domestic terrorism. But as Connor and the rest of his crew take to the streets, can they handle the dark thoughts buried inside the minds of 'we the people?' Aspen's newest hit series, MINDFIELD, comes to you courtesy of creator J.T. Krul who blends together a world of action and intrigue the likes of which you've never seen!

Genres: Comics

200 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 27, 2006

About the author

J. T. Krul is an American comic book writer, best known for his work on Aspen MLT's Fathom comic series. He is a graduate of Michigan State University, holding a Bachelors in Film and Video Production.

Reviews

[47Time · Rating 5 out of 5]

A team of five telepaths make up the CIA's Project Cobalt led by McManus. Their activity broaches upon thought crimes because they're trying to prevent crimes before they happen, but the bad guys' intent is obvious, so it's a lot more clear-cut who the good guys are. They are mobilized against a major threat on American citizens that will leave its mark on each of them.

The deeper aspects of the story concern the inherent evil in humans. These are behaviours that can't be removed, only controled to some degree. Connor, the most powerful member of Cobalt, feels this evil and often finds it difficult to go on, but the very same evil motivates him in his work. His ability can help a lot of innocents and he refuses to give up the fight.

The Department of Defense hired 12 programmers to rewrite sequences of code dealing with password protocols for the US nuclear stockpile. They were hypnotized to forget everything they did there, but a mysterious organization has been capturing them and gaining information on vulnerabilities in the code. The organization employs two telepaths that are able to enter a subject's mind and extract even things hidden by hypnosis. One more programmer, a young woman named Jess (who is a bit too hot to be a coder), is left and Project Cobalt must get to her before the bad guys do.

The bad guys corner Jess and kill her boyfriend before the two telepaths enter her mind, leaving her body catatonic. Connor discovers the mind thieves and joins them on the psychic plane. He reaches Jess and they get to a semblance of safety in one of her memories. They rely on the other members of Cobalt to find the two telepaths who are skilled enough that they get away with one of Jess's wrists - apparently it's enough to extract the code. Cobalt are hit hard and wake up in hospital. Connor confronts McManus about the other two telepaths and the project that created them to reveal some unpleasant secrets about their condition.

Using the recovered code, the bad guys obtaine a nuclear warhead. Dylan manages to telepathically find the location of their base, but they are moving the warhead in a van toward the Mall of America where their leader Lucien plans to kill tens of thousands. Connor stalls him telepathically until he can hit Lucien with enough psychic energy to take him out. Meanwhile Isaac and Kaseem recover the warhead.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I don’t think it's great. There are the pieces of greatness in here, it's got a great if arguably generic idea, and the way it explores the toll of delving into the mind of others and having to be prepared to kill that person is very interesting. Its got a great protagonist that you feel has gotten himself in far too deep and is slowly having his ignorance ripped away from him. The art style is quite very good if inconsistent at times and there is a really nice use of repetitive composition at one point to emphasise how much a character has had stripped away from them.

But overall this feels poorly fleshed out. Like for a book that has a major focus on hallucinogenics the imagery is pretty boring, The main characters besides Connor are not very interesting. The main villain is massively underexplored. The plot is quite by the numbers with nothing to elevate it beyond that. It touches on some interesting ideas, especially in the ways it critiques the ideas of the patriot act but it never pushes those ideas further so they end up feeling flat and actually perhaps promoting what it is critiquing. It uses a bunch of quotes in an attempt to build an atmosphere that just comes across as kind of pretentious to me.
There are two completely out of nowhere twists at the end that both feel confusing and tacked on.

Maybe this will improve but as is it feels like a lot of the good stuff here goes to waste. 4/10

[Ezma · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a neat concept, but didn't feel much about the characters or the plot. Feels too much like a network TV series?? Like tune in each week and watch the psychics fight crime for the CIA. Wondering where some of these plot threads would've gone if the series had continued, not in a good way but in a "what was this even leading to" way.