the Pilgrim #1 - IDW Publishing

There's really only one reason that I picked up this book . . Mike Grell. I love this guys work. But I hadn't heard anything about this series ahead of time, so I had no idea what to expect. Then before reading it, I noticed some of the ads for the book. Especially the part, 'This is a work of fiction. Although inspired by historical facts.' The first thing I thought was, 'Oh no, it's going to be a 'war' book.' I don't have anything against them, but . . they're definitely not my favorite genre. And that's what this is . . kind of. But not really in the way I was thinking. Basically . . the story starts out in WWII, in what looks like one of Hitler's command bunkers. It's not fully explained, yet, but it looks like it has to do with all that 'magic' and 'mysticism' stuff that Hitler was all obsessed with. It looks like they're dealing with the 'Spear of Destiny' . . maybe. But then we also see what I assume is some people in London doing some 'remote viewing' to see what the enemy is up to. The other people seem to have some kind of orb. Anyways, things go wrong when London is bombed. The orb is broken and we see that they've let some kind of demon, or something, loose. Then the story skips to the present, and a place called Psimex Research institute. It looks like a normal business, but it's actually a cover for military experiments in psychic powers . . specifically, 'remote viewing'. We see a General visiting the facility to check on their progress. There's some terrorist guy that he's out to get, but they have no 'actionable intelligence'. That's what he's counting on this group for. We see this General talking to the guy I assume runs the facility. They're both real ass-holes, but . . I'm not sure yet which one is bigger. We also see what's going on from the subjects point of view. They're trying to get the information that they want, but . . it's hard for them to ignore the guys in the hallway talking about them when their emotions are so raw and vagrant. They just have to be careful that they don't find out that they're watching them. They monitor them with encephalographs, and somehow they can use them to tell them what they're 'viewing'. It's the first issue, so . . not everything is explained yet. Right now we have to do a lot of filling-in between the lines. And the last part of the story is about a specific soldier who's still in the middle-east . . Tom. It's a flashback of this guy who seems to have the same power, and used it to save his squad from a bombing. But those things still result in somebody dying, so . . now he's having nightmares. I would imagine that this guy Tom is the Pilgrim. He's out there doing the same thing they're doing in the government projects, but . . he's doing it alone. Like I said . . it's only the first issue, so . . there's still an awful lot to fill in. But . . my curiosity has been piqued. Mark Ryan writes the story, and . . it's definitely interesting. Of course it doesn't hurt that Mike's art looked simply amazing. I'll definitely be looking forward to issue #2. Now I kind of want to see where this story goes.