Review by Ian Keogh

The Farm System originates with baseball, where the major league teams season their younger players by having them work with feeder clubs at lower levels with the intention of gradually progressing them to the first team squad. In the world created by Rich Koslowski the same applies to superheroes, and their world also features agents and representatives wanting make their slice of the available money, one of whom is Alexander Ellison.

Ellison is deceptive, manipulative and self-serving, a man who skirts around the law without explicitly breaking it. Some older superheroes are wise to his methods, but he certainly knows how to impress the newbies. He’s the way into what mixes the Korean teenage band production line and Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, but with the attitude of a military academy, although that only provides the backdrop to what’s largely episodic conversational humour. Koslowski will take an idea such as why anyone would call themselves the Grind, plays it out toward a punchline for a few pages and moves on, although characters do recur, some more than others.

The majority of the cast are recognisable as versions of familiar superheroes, some used for parodic purposes, others to illicit more sympathy than their counterparts. They’re drawn differently enough so that DC and Marvel don’t alert the lawyers, and in every way Koslowski’s illustration is designed to de-glamorise the existence of superheroes. It’s good, detailed when necessary and excellent at establishing personalities, but never presents the world as anything other than grimy.

A character calling himself the Gymnast is frequently featured, and represents one of several ways Koslowski brings something new to the world of superheroes. Being grumpy and stumpy, he’s based on Wolverine, yet his purpose is to display the dedication to an ideal, and what that single-mindedness can cost.

There are plots running in the background from the beginning, but the way Koslowski rapidly escalates them to the foreground near the end is surprising. This isn’t just one plot thread, but several pieces of foreshadowing drawn together very efficiently, followed by an epilogue underlining Ellison’s sleazy personality.

Some pages are just played for laughs, but F.A.R.M. System has something interesting to say about superheroes, and were they to exist in reality it’s more logical than the Justice League. Smart, funny and absorbing, there’s enough mileage for a sequel in Rage.