Following DC’s Future Quest series mashing up most of the Hanna-Barbera 1960s cartoons, DC published 12 issues of Future Quest Presents showcasing various characters in solo adventures in the aftermath of the big crossover. Space Ghost gets a multi-part arc, followed by the Galaxy Trio (who were more interesting than I found them on TV), Birdman, Mightor, the Herculoids (the weakest arc) and Frankenstein Junior.
Without a running plot and with a variety of different creative teams, this doesn’t work as well as the original. Still, fun enough I’d have liked to see more (and some stories hint at the possibility) but apparently that’s it for this universe.
THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM is a comic book series by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward of which I recently read the first two collections, Walking the Path and Edge of Everything. It’s set within a small solar system dominated by a powerful church and an all-powerful Lux corporation (think Amazon for an equivalent). Protagonist Jess is a novice nun who discovers the church is in cahoots with Lux; Grix, a space captain who works freelance deliveries for Lux winds up allied with Jess against the sinister cabal.
This is a mixed bag. I honestly don’t care about the evil forces arrayed against our heroes, but the characters are strong enough to keep me reading — though the second book introduces too many supporting characters for me to care about any of them. I’ll be back for V3 though.
METAL MEN: Full Metal Jacket by Len Wein and Yildiray Cinar was DC’s attempt to revive “the robots who think they’re human” during the New 52 reboot (from the same Legends of Tomorrow anthology book as Metamorpho: Two Worlds, One Master). Surprisingly this was a lot of fun, Wein clearly knowing and liking the team.
As in the original series, the Metal Men are a group of self-aware robots who can shapeshift and use the natural abilities of their metal forms — Mercury can turn liquid, Lead is radiation proof, Tina (Platinum) can spin super-thin wire, etc. A sinister hacker, Nameless, is unleashing assorted robots built for the DOD to force Doc Magnus to turn his creations over to him: Nameless can access anything through the Internet but the responsometers that power the Metal Men enable them to operate independently off-line. He wants them under his control, by any means necessary.
The resulting arc is fun, though it suffers from the setting: the villain behind Nameless, Mother Machine, was apparently a big threat who’d already appeared in other New 52 books; as I never read them, the reveal did nothing for me. That ain’t Wein’s fault, though.
Art top to bottom by Evan Shaner, Riccardo Federici, Ross Andru and Francis J. Manapul. All rights to images remain with current holders.
