Ballistic #2 – Review

By: Adam Egypt Mortimer (writer/creator), Darick Robertson (art/creator), Diego Rodriguez (colors) and Crank! (letters)

The Story: Butch needs to get help for his hung-over, sentient gun.

Review (with SPOILERS): The first issue of this series really caught me by surprise.  I get relatively few of my comics in paper form anymore, but am still an active reader of Previews and a pre-orderer.  So, I usually know precisely what comics will be handed to me when I visit the comic shop on Wednesdays.  Ballistic #1 caught me by surprise.  I’d forgotten it was coming out and didn’t have any expectations going into the first issue.  What I got was this incredibly rich world full of sentient devices, bad stereotype Asian villains and a demonic gun that uses recreational drugs.  It was big, beautiful and zany.  I loved it.

I suspected that this issue might not be as special merely because I now had expectations.  However, The Mortimer/Robertson team has kept the awesome rolling again.  I’m confident that this will be an awesome little series.

Every few pages there is some cool concept introduced or some visual image that just seizes you and forces you to pay attention.  We start with a cool introduction to what has gone wrong in this future world: How it all crashed before being saved by this organic technology lead to sentient guns, flying cars with dragon wings and walls that just open up to allow maintenance.  All of these crash scenarios are cool and could merit their own series just based on the concept: Flesh-eating acid rain, AIDS robots, weaponized contagious rage blackouts, giant mosquitos…  We get nothing more than a panel of each and then are rushed along to the story.  It reminds me of visiting a zoo and you’re enjoying looking at the gorillas and then someone makes you go along because the lions are being fed live meat and then they yank you along again to watch monkeys knife-fighting.

Ballistic #1 – Review

By: Adam Egypt Mortimer (writer/story), Darick Robertson (art/story), Diego Rodriguez (colors) and Crank! (letters)

The Story: An air conditioner repairman and his sentient pistol get into trouble with the Korean mafia.

Review (with minor SPOILERS): Geez… This comic really scratched that itch that demands something “different” in your comics.  I really loved it and recommend you seek it out.  If I had to give it a music comparison, it would be kinda like you were calming listening to soft jazz (i.e. other comics this week) and one of your friends snuck up, switched your music to old, British punk rock and jacked the volume all the way up… It certainly makes you sit up in your chair and pay attention.

This was actually a hard review to write because what makes the comic nifty are all cool visuals and concepts.  The first couple of drafts of the review descended into “and then he got into his car…..and it had demonic wings that matched the candy-apple red pain of his 50’s Chevy coupe…..and then his gun shot fire everywhere and then…”  I hate those types of reviews, but it’s an issue that functions at that crazy-stuff, overload level, so it is hard to avoid the “and then…” aspect.

The story is set in a near future Korea where all the technology is at least somewhat demonic/organic.  I mentioned the protagonist’s winged car, but this organic theme goes everywhere.  In fact, the protagonist is an air conditioner repairman and to fix the AC, he has to do things like convince an organic wall to open an orifice, then he plunges in his arm and rummages around in the guts of the beast until he finds the part/organ that isn’t working.  If you read and enjoyed Orc Stain, this comic has that same type of feel where all the devices are alive.  The setting feels like something that could have happened on the other side of the world from the Transmetropolitan characters.  I can almost imagine Spider Jerusalem saying, “I’d never go to Korea where they have all those f*****-up demon cars….”

But, the most interesting object in the story is the protagonist’s gun.  See, even though he is an AC repairman, he’s a wanna-be hustler.  So, he is always afoul of techno Korean gangsters and owes money to all the wrong people. Hence, he carries this awesome, sentient demonic pistol.  When he shoots the gun, it wraps it’s tail around his forearm and sucks adrenalin from his blood stream; the more excited the protagonist is, the more the gun can shoot.  And the gun is funny, with its dialog is all loud and crude.  Love it…