It may not come as a shock to most of you, but I really like video games. A lot. I enjoy playing them, reading about them, writing about them, and podcasting about them. I also enjoy comic books. The combination of these two mediums is one of the oldest formulas in modern geek culture (does anyone else remember Superman or Spiderman on the Atari 2600?). Sometimes it works really well. I’ve played through the last-gen Punisher title multiple times, as well as Marvel: Legends and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Other times, it does not. I won’t even mention that list; it’s simply too painful.

Yesterday when I was out and about, contributing to the economy—buying things I may not need but thought looked pretty dang cool—I was browsing through the racks of comic books at a book store and found issue #1 of DC Wildstorm’s new game-based prequel comic, PROTOTYPE. I purchased it and had a chance to give it a read-through last night so I could share my thoughts with the community today.

Find out more after the jump!

WildStorm, a branch of DC Comics, is producing the six-issue series based on Radical Entertainment/Activision/Sierra Entertainment’s upcoming sandboxer, slated for an NA release on June 9^th of this year (June 12^th in EU).

The premise of the game begins with Alex Mercer, an average New Yorker who goes about his life as normal until the day he becomes the target of a bio-weapon on a subway platform. From there his day goes from bad to worse, waking up in the morgue some time later to find out he’s got an insatiable hunger and the ability to grow scythe-like claws, leap tall buildings, and basically $*%& stuff up.

Radical Entertainment’s new take on the idea of a werewolf-esque protagonist intrigues me, so the thought of a comic that gave us the backstory on how Alex and the entire project intrigued me, but sometimes prequel books and comics for video games or movies are a gamble. Many publishing houses wanting to sell copies of books based on IP will hire a cheaper writer trying to cut their teeth for bigger projects, so the actual talent and skill of the writer doing the work varies.

For example, I looked at a copy of a prequel novel for Bioware’s upcoming “Dragon Age” game (set for Q4 2009), and while I normally enjoy fantasy and it wasn’t horrible reading, the writing style of the author just didn’t grab me in the bit that I read.

PROTOTYPE is being penned by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, with the art and inking being done by Darick Robertson and Matt Jacobs. Gray and Palmiotti often work as a team on WildStorm projects, and both have quite a few titles to their names, as do Darick Robertson and Matt Jacobs. In short, this comic was not done by novices.

So what about the comic itself? Read on for some info…

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