My Greatest Adventure #7 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: Robotman is steaming!  G-Man takes out the trash!  Tanga kills puppies!

The Review: And with that, we come to the end of this grand, though ultimately unsuccessful, experiment in showcase comics.  In a more patient, less expensive decade, perhaps this kind of series would have found greater support, but now, it feels like a half-charming, half-exasperating novelty from a bygone era.  While “Garbage Man” concludes, rather optimistically, “The end for now,” I think the feature’s partners are more prudent in their use of the more final, “The end.”

Matt Kindt clearly had a lot of ideas for where to take Robotman, but the limitations of his format forces him to squeeze as many of them together as possible, making for a much less unified storyline.  He spent so much of the previous issues playing out Robotman’s inability to engage in human feeling that this sudden fixation on Cliff’s mechanical body not allowing him to harm another human comes a bit out of the blue.  Still, this conflict proves that at the very least, Cliff retains a potential for outrage and bitterness that is certainly not very robotic.  Kindt also tries once more to develop the relationship between Maddy and Cliff, but is ultimately hampered by our hero’s affected coldness towards her, and the fact that they don’t have much natural chemistry between them anyway.  Scott Kolins continues to do his best work on this feature, so long as he avoids any scenes that require genuine emotion, where he can only make some passable melodrama.  As for Mike Atiyeh, let’s hope he brings the same vibrancy to his future work as he’s done for this one all along.

By this point, I must confess I review “Garbage Man” simply because I must.  Aaron Lopresti hasn’t written a terrible story, but he has written a terribly bland one.  Everything, from the legal drama to the conception of the protagonist himself, feels like something drawn off from another, better-crafted piece of work, then cobbled together into this merely functional tale.  For the last time, we watch the cast go through the motions of interacting with each other and projecting personality, only to come off more mechanical than Robotman claims to be: “I’m not to be trusted.  Nor am I interested in your foolish bravado.”  In the end, the best thing you really got out of this feature was Lopresti’s art, Matt Ryan’s inks, and John Kalisz’s colors.

My Greatest Adventure #3 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: Robotman in the jungle!  Garbage Man meets Batman!  Tanga flies with whales!

The Review: Back in my creative writing days, I had a professor (shout-out to Ron Carlson) who would talk to us about the hump of fiction known as the “Big Fat Middle,” the long stretch of stuff between the beginning and the end, the dreaded second act.  Here is where the merits of a story rises to the top or hits rock bottom, where a writer has to maintain your interest as his plot builds and finds itself.  Needless to say, many otherwise fine stories fall to the Big Fat Middle.

So it goes with “Robotman.”  Matt Kindt did a good job setting up a Silver Agey version of the mechanical man, putting Cliff’s technological capabilities to creative use (less so here, as Cliff simply burns his way through the mecha-snake’s gullet).  But this installment mostly treads ground we’ve covered before—Robotman’s regenerative abilities, Maddy’s guilt (of what, we still don’t know), the mutating nanites—and there isn’t quite enough action to make up for the lack of new information.  At least Scott Kolins continues to deliver a perky, charming-looking feature, and Mike Atiyeh employs a stunning spectrum of colors for all the nanite-infected creatures in the story, from silver-red geckos to sapphire blue butterflies to neon purple-green-yellow lava monsters—yes, I did say nanite-infected lava monster.  It’s pretty neat.

Aaron Lopresti already draws Batman over on Justice League International, but now he gets to write the Dark Knight too.  For the most part, he does a fine job.  His Batman is a to-the-point, tough-talking guy, although so generic you can probably have the same dialogue come out of any cop’s mouth: “You can talk.  Good.  Stay down.  I have some questions I want answered.”  It seems his only service to the story is to act as investigator, so I don’t know if his use in this story is worth his distracting presence.  Then again, without him, you basically have a cut-and-dry business drama (“I want this trail dead and buried.  Permanently.”) and some random monster-versus-monster action.  Still, a dinosaur in the sewer can be pretty good times, and Lopresti delivers a good-looking feature, well serviced by Matt Ryan’s inks and John Kalisz’s colors.

My Greatest Adventure #2 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: Robotman gets in a tight squeeze.  Garbage Man learns the pitfalls of hailing ladies from dark alleys.  Tanga blows her stack.

The Review: For everyone who loves to read, you know a good story when it not only captures your interest, but sustains it, making you lose your sense of time and place until you finish, blinking in surprise that you are indeed still on Earth.  A multi-part feature doesn’t make itself conducive to that kind of immersive experience.  Just when you really start getting into the story, it cuts itself off, leaving you faintly annoyed at the interruption.  So it goes here.

Matt Kindt’s “Robotman” has really shaped up to be an enjoyable sample of classic sci-fi, unapologetically zany with plenty of heart.  While Cliff has a couple moments of moodiness, where he blandly notes his increasing lack of humanity, mostly he delivers a dry narration that complements the wacky storyline well: “…it’s up to me to figure out a way to kill this crazy mutated rice that’s zombified all these people…!”  Kindt makes good on this series’ title, giving Cliff out-of-box quests to sort out, like a giant, mechanized snake, but he also maintains some ongoing drama in the background; it turns out the tension between Cliff and Maddy may be more than just romantic, as Cliff states, “Since the race in Utah…I know she feels guilty.  And maybe she should.”  I must say, when Scott Kolins can go all-out cartoony, he delivers mighty fun, Silver Age-esque art, bolstered by Mike Atiyeh’s Technicolors.

It gets a little harder to talk about Aaron Lopresti’s “Garbage Man” every time it appears.  Lopresti hasn’t managed to do anything to endear the character to our hearts or get us invested in his story.  Besides an overall lack of direction to the plot (when the Reverend asks G. Man what he wants to do, the monsterfied man replies vaguely, “I don’t know.  I want my life back.”), the feature lacks a specific tone.  Superficially, it aims for serious horror, but the simplistic, obvious writing just can’t cut it, not with such soapy lines as, “Richard, I…I can’t believe it!  I’m so happy you’re alive…!”  And it seemed a mistake from the beginning to bring in Batman as a supporting character, as he’s done nothing for the story except make us question why he’s there.  By now, Lopresti’s solid art (with Matt Ryan’s inks and John Kalisz’s colors) just can’t make up for the script’s undermining failings.