Soldier Zero #4 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Javier Pina (art), Archie Van Buren (colors), Ed Dukeshire (letters) & Bryce Carlson (editor)

The Story: Big time throw down between the Soldier Zero/Stewart construct and the bad guy.  Or is he?

What’s Good: If you’re into sci-fi themed comics, there really aren’t too many outlets right now, so you might want to check this out.  This is an pretty solid issue that showcases a huge throw-down between our protagonist, Stewart, who is wearing a good suit of armor and the evil suit of armor that has taken as its host a decomposing policeman.  Ewwww!  Does that give him magical stink powers?

The battle itself is really nicely done and some of the events start to call into question whether Soldier Zero (which I think is the name of Stewart’s armor) is really a good guy.  Thus, it’s also open to interpretation whether the “bad guy” is really bad.  Nonetheless it is a good fight and there is just enough of this “shades of gray” drama that you know that things are not quite as simple as they seem.

I have no major complaints about the art.  I’m not measuring a spot on my wall for where a framed original page can go, but it is perfectly fine and tells the story nicely.  Many comic artists that are trying to do creative things on the page need to master good, basic storytelling first which is what we’re getting on Solider Zero right now.

Soldier Zero #3 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Sergio Arino (art), Archie Van Buren (colors), Ed Dukeshire (letters) & Bryce Carlson (editor)

The Story: Our protagonist comes into contact with a very smelly bad guy!

What’s Good: This continues to be a pretty good comic good.  It isn’t anything awesome that will change your life, but if you’re looking for a good, well-written comic in the sci-fi/superhero genre that will (probably) never require you to buy other titles as part of a company-wide crossover event, you might be pretty happy with it.  In fact, this is probably the type of comic that I’d suggest to new readers because it is self-contained and it represents comics very well.

The basic story is interesting: paraplegic Marine Capt. Stewart Trautman has bonded with a sentient and symbiotic alien suit of armor that fell to Earth.  Stewart has only caught a glimpse of what galactic events led to that suit being on Earth, but he has learned that others of these alien symbiotes are on Earth…and not all of them are friendly.  For some reason, this comic continues to give me a ROM Spaceknight vibe (which is a good thing).

In this issue I especially enjoyed the depiction of the other alien as we learned that policeman the alien has boded with is actually dead.  So, the symbiote is actually piloting a corpse around and that means that things are going to get smelly and fly-infested and that he has to do things to repair the corpse since it doesn’t heal itself.  Neat-o!

The art continues to be pretty standard fare at Boom!  There is nothing too adventurous in terms of style.  If you showed this to someone who hadn’t read comics in decades (or ever), they would agree that this is what a comic book looks like.  All of the anatomy is correct and there are no technical mistakes.  All of the storytelling works.  That may sound like I’m handing out a backhanded compliment, but I’m not.  It is incredible how many artists screw up basic stuff.

Soldier Zero #2 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Javier Pina & Sergio Arino (art), Archie Van Buren (colors), Ed Dukeshire (letters) & Bryce Carlson (editor)

The Story: We learn a LOT more about “Soldier Zero”, why he is here, how he works, etc.

What’s Good: The first issue of Soldier Zero was not so hot.  It spent a lot of time mewling over the central character and establishing that he was a Marine officer in a wheelchair, but he didn’t need any kind of special help…dammit!  It was okay character work, but we didn’t really see Soldier Zero until the very end.  With that lead in, I was surprised to see that….

This issue really kinda kicks ass!  We learn that this Soldier Zero thing that has come to Earth and bonded with our main character is a combination of Iron Man’s Extremis armor suit and the Trills from the Star Trek universe (or Venom, I guess).  [SPOILERS]  The suit is an alien symbiote, whose original host died during the space battle that was shown, but not explained, in issue #1.  The suit needed to grab someone just to stay alive and it settled for our main character.  The Iron Man thing comes in with how the suit manifests as it just kinda appears and can cover only certain parts of the body if need be, but it is not something that you put on like a pair of pants.

Why is the alien here?  Well, the mission is very interesting as well: It seems to be a modernization of ROM Spaceknight, one of my favorite comics of the early 1980’s.  Somehow Earth has been infiltrated by evil aliens that can assume human shape.  The Soldier Zero construct has fought against them in the past and can see them, but it is probably going to look like he is murdering innocent humans when he zaps them (just like ROM) and he won’t be able to get help from the authorities because he doesn’t know how pervasive the evil aliens are (just like ROM).

While it does seem to be an amalgam of story elements that we’ve seen before, it works for two reasons: One, ROM is so screwed up from an intellectual property standpoint that Marvel will never be able to do that character or even reprint the original comics.  So I’m happy to see someone continuing a ROM-like adventure.  Two, the story is well written and illustrated.  Story concepts are pretty easy, but writing and drawing them in an engaging fashion is hard and the creative team pulled it off (which was an especially difficult challenge given that I really didn’t like issue #1 very much).

Soldier Zero #1 – Review

By: Paul Cornell (writer), Javier Pina (art), Alfred Rockefeller (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)

The Story: A handicapped U.S. Army veteran gains the powers of alien being who has fallen to Earth after being wounded in a cosmic battle.

What’s Good: The story is pretty serviceable and has promise.  This issue is entirely set-up as we meet Stewart, who is a wheelchair bound U.S. Army veteran and start to learn about his life as a recently handicapped guy.  All the predictable stuff is there and Cornell handles it quite well: Stewart’s desire to be treated normally, flash backs to his injury, problems with dating, girl’s finding him cute but wondering if his man-parts work, etc.

This is interspersed with snippets showing Soldier Zero engaged in a big cosmic battle.  Nothing is revealed about who Soldier Zero is or who he is fighting, but that will clearly become a major focus of the series.

Pina’s art serves the story well.  Boom! seems to encourage their artists to stay within the story because you never see attempts (even failed attempts) to create grand splash pages and Boom!’s devotion to story seems to be their differentiating factor (compared to Marvel/DC).  You never have any wonder what is going on in a panel because Pina has chosen some weird perspective or lighting source.  It’s just clear and straight forward comic art.