SIX OF US #1 REVIEW – TOM KING TURNS SITCOM NOSTALGIA INTO A HOLLYWOOD NIGHTMARE!

Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta getting the band back together after The Vision is already enough to make comic heads lean forward, but Six of Us #1 does not walk in begging you to clap because of the reunion. This sucker opens with a funeral, six famous faces, a whole lot of old baggage, and the immediate feeling that somebody in this cast knows way more than they are saying. That is the hook, and King is smart enough not to explain the mystery until all the air is gone from it.

The setup revolves around the former stars of a beloved sitcom, people who became family in front of America while apparently becoming something much messier behind the cameras. One of them is dead, everybody is back in the same orbit, and King starts cutting between public grief, private conversations, old memories, and the version of these people that television audiences thought they knew. The issue is not interested in simply asking who did what. It is more concerned with how years of fame, resentment, loyalty, guilt, and performance have changed the way these people talk to each other.

That is where Gabriel Hernandez Walta absolutely earns his money. This is not a comic built around splash-page fireworks. The tension lives in faces, posture, where somebody stands in relation to somebody else, who looks away, who keeps talking too long, and who suddenly stops. Walta makes a cemetery conversation feel like a knife fight because he understands that acting on the page is still acting. There are sequences where the cast is arranged almost like performers waiting for their marks, and then the composition quietly shifts once the emotional mask slips. Man, that is good comics.

King’s dialogue is doing a lot of the same work. People talk around things. They interrupt. They make jokes that are not really jokes. They revisit old stories with completely different emotional meanings depending on who is telling them. Every once in a while King’s familiar repetition and rhythmic phrasing gets a little too visible, like you can see the gears underneath the dialogue, but Walta keeps those moments grounded because the characters never stop feeling physically present in the scene.

Jordie Bellaire’s colors are sneaky as hell here. The palette helps separate moods and time periods without throwing giant neon signs over every transition. The present-day material carries a cooler, heavier emotional temperature, while the memories and entertainment-industry spaces can turn warmer, brighter, or more artificial depending on what the story needs. When the comic slides from real life into something that feels staged, Bellaire makes you feel the shift before you consciously start analyzing it. That is exactly what color should be doing.

Clayton Cowles also has a deceptively tough job because the issue moves through overlapping dialogue, title-card style transitions, character introductions, and scenes where the rhythm of the conversation matters as much as the words themselves. The lettering keeps King readable without flattening that rhythm. You know who is controlling the conversation, who is losing it, and where the awkward silence lives, which is important in a book where silence can be louder than somebody yelling.

The only thing I can see frustrating some readers is how aggressively this first issue refuses to hand over the whole picture. King gives you enough to understand the relationships, but he is clearly planting information for later, and some of the mystery is built through purposeful disorientation. If you want issue one to walk in, solve the murder, explain everybody’s trauma, and tuck you into bed, wrong comic, papi. This is a slow-burn ensemble mystery and it knows exactly what kind of patience it is asking from you.

For me, the confidence sells it. Six of Us #1 feels like creators who trust each other and trust the reader. Walta is allowed to tell half the story with a glance. Bellaire can change the emotional weather without announcing it. Cowles can let pauses sit. King does not have to turn every secret into a cliffhanger speech. The result is a first issue that feels polished without feeling sterile, mysterious without becoming deliberately confusing, and dramatic without everybody screaming like they are auditioning for the final episode of a soap opera.

This is not The Vision 2.0, and that is exactly why the reunion matters. The same team chemistry is there, but they are using it on a completely different kind of monster: fame, memory, friendship, and whatever the hell really happened behind that sitcom smile. Yeah, I am in!

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Creative Team: Writer: Tom King. Artist: Gabriel Hernandez Walta. Colorist: Jordie Bellaire. Letterer: Clayton Cowles. Editor: Daniel Chabon. Assisting Editor: Chuck Howitt-Lease. Assistant Editor: Foster R. Kupbens.

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