*Upfront Disclosure: Hybrids creator Luke Stone is a contributor to The Splintering website.

We recently got a chance to read digital versions of Arrow Comics’ Hybrids: The Sons of Gods volumes 1 and 2.* According to the writer Luke Stone (and co-artist, and letterer…), he started work on these stories in 2016. So, the ten chapters that make up these two volumes have been seven-plus years in the making.

The first volume subtitled Trash Day is a 148-page complete story arc that is comprised of six chapters. The first four are parts of the original story arc and the remaining two appear to be either ashcans or supplemental side-stories that further evolve the story and develop one of the main characters.

This first volume of Hybrids introduces Stone’s characters and world, which includes the stories of a new species and the dangers that they deal with to protect themselves and others. They work to save their family and friends that were kidnapped by the Hybrid Engineering Corp. In this first six-chapter volume, the creative team changes from chapter to chapter, but the core team consists of artist Brian Dawson—who takes on the role of layout artist along with Tony Alvarez in the later chapters—while Patrick Gama provides the colors and Piper Steed rounds out the team as the editor.

The second volume, this time subtitled The Killing Field, is another 148-page arc that follows the same characters from the first volume. However, this time, the heroes get a lot more “hands-on” with the villains, meaning a lot more action. The six chapters in this second volume are made up of the four main parts of the second arc, a short backstory of one of the villains, and what appears to be a short story featuring future characters where Stone looks to have included backers from a “drawn-in” backer tier.

Throughout The Killing Field, the heroes work to find the scattered pieces of a sword that will be needed to take down a demon and rescue a particular individual who could have an immense impact in their future. They team also continues to discover things about themselves, their abilities, and how far they can push their limits. The creative team for the second volume mostly remains the same as Trash Day. Co-layout artist Tony Alvarez did not return for this arc, but we see the reemergence of letterer Nikki Powers and fill-in letterer Eric Weathers for one chapter each.

I remember seeing these Hybrids projects among creator Luke Stone’s latest campaigns on both Indiegogo and Fund My Comic. I also recall being a bit confused and unsure of what exactly was being featured, and without knowing much about the IP, I didn’t want to jump into the middle of the arc. Getting the chance to review the digital versions of both trade paperback volumes allowed me to have greater insight into the the Hybrids world that Stone has built over several years. Both of these volumes can still be backed here.

There is a lot to this story—nearly 300 pages of characters, lore, build-up and battles, in fact—to take in. The story was fast-paced and fairly easy to follow despite being page-heavy. Most of the time, the character interactions and overall plot progression was engaging enough. There were a few points where I felt the development was a little weak. I had to flip back to previous pages, sometimes even chapters, to see if I could find some kind of information I might have missed. In most of these situations, I was trying to keep up with who each of the characters were, particularly with new character introductions. For example, at one point, one of the villains gets a new partner who seems to appear out of nowhere. Flipping back through the pages for clues to what I seemed to have missed, I noticed that this new partner was a background character (one of those being experimented on?) in a previous chapter. This ‘ascent’ seemed rather abrupt to me. Maybe there will be more elaboration in a future Hybrids side-story or ashcan, because he has some personality issues that will be interesting to explore.

If it wasn’t clear by now, Hybrids does feature a lot of characters, and I don’t feel as though they got enough time for the reader to thoroughly grasp who they are. This is my primary gripe with the series, as it wasn’t until I was into the second volume that I felt as though I was starting to understand who each of the characters were when they were referred to by their given names. However, even after reading both 148-page Hybrids volumes, I am not able to recall the names of all the characters, nor would I say that I fully understand what their powers allow them to do. Maybe some information was cut out to narrow the focus to mostly the main points and the action needed to move the story along. But as a reader, I felt as though I was missing a strong connection to the characters.

All of this character chatter is kind of odd considering how the author’s commentary in these volumes discussed how real the characters were in his mind, and how so much like friends they were to him (making certain events in the second volume emotionally difficult for him). But given the years spent working out the story details and the characters, I didn’t find that these connections for a reader translated very well for whatever may have been in the creator’s mind. My long weekend with the book can’t substitute for the seven years of development, but I just didn’t find that a rich connection to the characters was adequately conveyed.

The art improves from chapter to chapter, which isn’t unexpected, and it does a decent job of bringing the story to the page. The layouts and action flowed well, but there were some moments where I question the stylistic choices or consistency. For example, a series of panels show the extremely large “Trashman” character to be a very different height compared to the rest of the team. Another panel used for an introduction seemed to show the new character appearing to float over the whole page. This was probably not the intention, but the overlap of the bottom panel and different perspectives caused me to do a double-take, and I admittedly chuckled a bit, which I’m sure wasn’t the intention. Some panel details were a little vague, particularly where the characters were small or blacked-out, and I had to work harder than I should have to determine who was in the panel.

I’m not sure if this was a story or an art miss, but there was one point where one character’s fiancée slaps him, and I have no idea why it happened. It may have been a situation where he might have said something or made a look at another female in the scene, but going back to the previous panels, nothing added up. Just – Smak!

As I mentioned previously, there were a lot of action scenes, and the artist did well to portray goings-on in these scenes, all with the help of the strong colors and character design. While the art was a little more on the cartoonistic (cartoonish? cartoony?) side, I felt that it all came across as quite dynamic and was more and more impressive with each subsequent chapters. The colors were bold and there was a nice palette choice for a team action book, all of which added to the action scenes and made it easier to distinguish the all important who-was-doing-what-and-what-was-going-on.

Before closing out, is also worth mentioning that nothing in either Hybrids volume’s subject matter or art went beyond anything that I would consider to be “all-ages” content. There is some violence and gore, but none of it was too different from anything seen on modern television.

Overall, I would say that Luke Stone and the rest of the Hybrids crew have some very good foundations for an interesting world and future stories. I’m not sure if reading all those pages and having it seem like they flew by is 100% a good thing, but it was entertaining. Despite some character confusion and odd creative choices, I particularly enjoyed the art and colors, and I had a good time reading it. Despite both volumes collectively weighing in at nearly 300 pages and featuring the first 10 chapters of the story, it feels as though these books have only skimmed the surface and that there is a lot more to these characters that have yet to be discovered. You can dive into the Hybrids story so far via Fund My Comic here.

*Disclosure. Digital versions of Hybrids: The Sons of Gods volumes 1 and 2 were provided to The Splintering for the purpose of this review.

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