My Greatest Adventure #6 – Review

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

The Story: Robotman burns out, G-Man fights the law, and Tanga exchanges fluids.

The Review: Can you believe that we’re already winding down the last couple issues of DC’s second sci-fi showcase?  Boy, do I feel old.  If I’m to be perfectly honest, both series have largely been disappointments.  For the most part, the features rarely rose above average, and none of them, not even Tanga, has been spectacular.  And for a title that’s a bit experimental and novel in form and substance, it really needed to be spectacular to prove itself.

Case in point: Matt Kindt’s “Robotman.”  Adventurous, but straightforward and constantly predictable, it does absolutely nothing to break out of the mold of sci-fi stories past, other than update the technology a bit.  Perhaps Kindt never intended to; his story features all the major elements of the old Silver Age tales: a tragic, accidental origin; a soapy romance; and a lot of incidental action sequences which don’t quite bind together as a cohesive plot.  It’s actually quite easy to forget exactly what Robotman’s supposed to be doing—trying to find a hostage, or something?  Once the series ends, I’ll probably most remember Scott Kolins as finally finding the material best suited to his style: simple and kooky, its emotions very adaptable to his tendency toward the melodrama.  I’ll also remember wandering why Mike Atiyeh never employed these bright, beautiful splashes of colors before on Justice Society of America.

Also slogging through the middle ground of quality, but perhaps much deeper, is “Garbage Man.”  It has never been very clear what kind of story Aaron Lopresti wanted to tell with this character, whether a commentary on scientific morality, or a tragic love story, or a kind of horror-influenced thriller.  This feature has mainly been a mish-mash of all three plotlines, with none of them really leaping out and grabbing your attention.  At times, Lopresti throws in twists seemingly at random, like this sewer hobo whose dinosaur dreams can come to life, a side-effect of past experiments by ol’ Dr. Clive, the man behind Garbage Man himself.  Just as randomly, Lopresti will extinguish the obstacles he introduces; Dreaming Hobo (his name is unimportant, it seems), in a moment of self-hating angst very much at odds with the homeless dudes I know, offs himself rather than risk any more lives.  So ends a character with whom we have little to no connection whatsoever.  At least Lopresti works the art end as well as ever, with Matt Ryan and John Kalisz competently backing him up on inks and colors.

If you’re looking for surprises from this title, the only place to turn to is Kevin Maguire’s “Tanga.”  Here’s the thing: all of us could’ve predicted that her trembling surrender last issue was a ploy of some kind.  But could any of us, even the most astute, could have predicted that the ploy would involve Bruk, the disastrously potent liquor which caused Tanga to go off-kilter back in Weird Worlds #2?  The fact Maguire knows how to use little details he himself establishes, even incidental ones, to build his story already sets him at a level of craft beyond his comrades on this series.  And although it’s the most obvious joke in the world, you can’t help enjoying the revelation that the character with literally the biggest head in the book turns out to be the true mastermind of all the problems plaguing our heroine.  For indeed, she is a hero now, flying around, taking names, cracking jokes, all in the name of justice—a huge evolution for a protagonist who started out as a homeless nomad.  Maguire has consistently delivered the most memorable art of the series, and that continues to be the case, especially with Rosemary Cheetham providing techni-glow colors throughout.

Conclusion: We still have one more issue to go, and I’ll stick around for it, but I can say that having been to this rodeo twice now, I have no desire to return a third time around, not unless DC’s willing to throw a much greater investment behind the title to make it worthwhile.

Grade: C+

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – Law school may have ruined all “legal file” plot devices for me forever.  If any of you are in any way familiar with the discovery process, you know that a real file of documents would be more like a filing cabinet(s) of documents.  Much less sexy, I know.