Weird Worlds #3 – Review

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

The Story: Lobo and the psychic electric eels!  Garbage Man vs. the Wolf Man!  Tanga, savior of the doughboy race!

The Review: Sci-fi comes in two schools: your classic horror and space adventure stuff, and your mind-blowing, semi-existential, social commentary concepts.  Thanks to writers like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Jonathan Hickman, the material you see in comics nowadays lean more toward science metafiction—which is all well and good.  But it’s nice and kind of a relief to sit with something like Weird Worlds, which promises old-school, sci-fi fun.

Kevin VanHook’s Lobo comes across several twists this issue, most of them for the better. It turns out the Xanaxx chancellor turning out is not pure consciousness suspended in luminescent blue goo with electric eels swimming in it—disappointing, as it’s the first cool idea this story has come up with so far.  But VanHook makes a clever point about how these broad “scientific” concepts are quite nearly as farfetched as old-fashioned superstition.  He also puts the turnaround to good use by setting Lobo on a new, more heroic direction.  The dialogue is still pretty weak, leaning on the hopelessly silly, as the aliens seem a bit too Americanized in their references and language (“chicken fat,” “geek-fest,” and the worst: “Oh, cwap”).  Jerry Oroway’s art is as decent as ever, but it’s not a redeeming factor if you’re still not sold on VanHook’s story.