There’s no shortage of crowd funded comics projects around, but I love seeing the quality finished products, particularly local ones.

Faction is such a beast – edited by New Zealanders Damon Keen and Amie Maxwell, its a collection of work by a range of New Zealand comic creators. An independent anthology can be a mixed bag and Faction is certainly that – the whole gamut of art and story styles is covered, mostly successfully. A couple of the shorter pieces have jarring or non-resolving endings, and a couple of the others I struggled with art-wise, but that’s always an individual thing.

Bookish by Jonathan King and One Giant Leap from Damon Keen are the two big standouts for me – King’s concept could easily be developed into a longer story arc and Keen’s sense of humour would work in a big way as a regular strip. Aside from those two, there’s lots of good work in the book to enjoy. It’s obvious a huge amount of effort has gone into creating a quality product and hopefully there’s going to be a lot more issues of this down the track.

If you want to submit your own work for a future issue, read the first issue online for free or order a hard copy, it’s all available here. Kudos to those who funded the book and to the team that saw it to fruition.

Score: 8/10