FCBD Comics: The Mis-Adventures of Adam West/Walter Koenig's Things To Come

I really don't like Free Comic Book Day "comic books" that are just samplers, offering snippets of two or three different upcoming books.  These aren't comic books, they're ad brochures.  They're nothing special. Comics publishers give these things away for free all year.  The idea of Free Comic Book Day is to give new readers an actual comic book for free.  You should give the readers a complete story. or at least a complete chapter of a story--a full issue, in other words.  It doesn't have to be a brand new issue, it can be a reprint, or a "special FCBD edition" if you prefer, but it should be an entire comic.  

With that critique in mind, let's look at one such ad flyer from Bluewater Comics, featuring previews of the upcoming series The Mis-Adventures of Adam West and Walter Koenig's Things To Come.

The few pages of Things To Come presented here aren't really enough to give me any idea what the book will be about or if it will be any good or not.  However, the fact that this isn't one of those deals where a celebrity will lend his name to a comic and let some hack or newcomer write it but is instead actually written by the actor Walter Koenig, best known as Star Trek's Pavel Chekov, does not give me much hope that the series will be worth reading, or even readable.  The examples of Mr. Koenig's writing that I have encountered in the past have been pretty dreadful.  Take, for example, the episode of the animated Trek entitled "The Infinite Vulcan" which involves a giant clone of Mr. Spock.  The episode is so bad that it actually makes "Spock's Brain" look like a literary masterpiece by comparison.   

On the other hand, it appears that the involvement of Adam West in The Mis-Adventures of Adam West is limited to collecting the licensing fees, and that's probably for the best.  The writer, Russell Dauterman, and the artist, Reed Lackey, are complete unknowns to me.  The few pages presented give enough for the reader to get a pretty good idea of what the series will be about, and maybe even want to pick up the full issue if they like what they see. 

The set-up involves aging actor Adam West unable to find work, or at least work that he's willing to take, in modern Hollywood and lamenting the dearth of "real" heroes in today's world.  He receives a package containing a mysterious amulet which magically makes him young and presumably gives him the power to become the kind of hero he feel the world is missing.   It's not a wildly original premise, but one that could make for a fun series.

I wish Bluewater had given us a few more pages of this story instead of wasting paper on Things To Come.  Maybe if I've got a couple of bucks to spare come July, I might just check out the entire first issue of Adam West.