With any comic book property based on a beloved movie or teleseries, the other big question is whether the book's art captures those characters who we know so well as actors. On this score, artist Jean Diaz does best with Drazen and weakest with Sherry Palmer, whose head doesn't always seem to fit on her body, but I generally accepted his dour-faced Jack Bauer. An actioner like this also rises and falls on the strength of its battle sequences, but Diaz doesn't always make these scenes as clear as they could be. I had to stop and reread one page where a truck is blown over by a bazooka, for example, because the writers and artist kept the action on the preceding page inside the truck, then pulled so far away from the actual explosion that I wasn't immediately sure what I was seeing. In more than one panel, we're given big explosions where you never once believe that the stiff silhouettes being framed by the flames are actual human beings. If you can't give a big-assed fireball its props, then perhaps you should be doing the GN version of Men in Trees instead.

The bulk of Nightfall is devoted to our hero dodging Drazen's soldiers as he attempts to uncover the bad guy's location so a bombing mission can take him out. Through the course of the mission we get the usual big betrayal, but since the character who does this is the only who on the team besides Jack who comes across the least bit distinctly, it's not much of a surprise. That moment we've been waiting for -- when Jack and his target come face-to-face, cementing the antagonism that'll fuel Drazen's evil schemes in the show's first year -- never occurs, so tough luck if you were waiting for that particular pay-off. Perhaps that takes place in a second prequel set one year "to the day of Senator David Palmer's victory in the California primary"?