By: Mark Waid (writer), Peter Krause (art), Andrew Dalhouse (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)
The Story: More revelations about why the Plutonian flipped out!
What’s Good: Irredeemable is a difficult comic to review because it is hard to point to specific moments and say, “That was good!”. You know what was good about this: The whole comic was good. Mark Waid is just doing a great job of storytelling by NOT telling us everything in the first 3 issues. He just jumped into the story and has been dolling out background information about the characters ever since such that every issue has some major/minor revelation and you get the sense that he could keep this up for 50 issues. I’m very excited!
This comic has a LOT going on (without seeming cluttered), but there are two central themes and both work really well. First, we get to see Cary/Survivor teach the professorial Quibit a nasty lesson with an assistance from a mob of farmers. Remember how Quibit stopped the heroes from killing the Plutonian a few issues back……well that comes home to roost on Quibit here and I liked his comeuppance and his ultimate explanation for his behavior.
Finally, I really enjoyed that we teased into the relationship between Modeus and the Plutonian. Every since this series began, Modeus has been teased as the Lex Luthor to Plutoian’s Superman, but we haven’t really learned much about the guy. Here we see that Modeus has a little bit of the Joker in him too: He’s just a crazy dude causing mayhem and happens to focus his insanity on Plutonian. We also get a tidbit that Modeus was building Plutonian robots to *ahem* service Modeus sexually. Yet another example of this series’ bravado.
Through it all, Waid has made Plutonian a very interesting and three dimensional character. You can really understand almost how the dude snapped: all the expectations of the public, the lack of gratitude and accusations when things went less that perfectly AND being the personal target of a villain who is a combo of Luthor and the Joker would make anyone snap.
And…..there are about 3 other really cool things in this issue that would be “the cool thing” in a normal comic book, but slip into non-mentions in a review as good as Irredeemable.
What’s Not So Good: I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why, but I don’t love the art on this story as much as I love the story itself. The art isn’t bad and there is almost never a sloppy panel, but it is just reliable and solid art and in some ways that just isn’t quite good enough given the quality of story that Waid is telling. The art is very workmanlike and I’d like to see some creative panel designs, some variance in the thickness of the line… Anything to breathe more life into a page. That being said, there are a LOT of artists who would just screw this up totally. Krause isn’t screwing anything up, but I’d like to see his art “go for it” as much as Waid is doing with a story that includes Plutonian sex-robots.
Conclusion: Another month, another inspired story from Irredeemable.
Grade: B+
– Dean Stell