FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #5 – Review

By: Simon Oliver (story), Robbi Rodriguez (art), Rico Renzi (colors)

The Story: Whether it’s one made of wind or scientific abstraction, don’t go chasing tornadoes.

The Review: Without a doubt, my biggest peeve with the last issue of FBP was its timing.  The death of Jay and Adam’s hiatus from the physics-regulating agency was meant to have an emotional impact that it hadn’t nearly earned yet, which struck me as a little arrogant.  The sad part is that both of these developments probably could have had that kind of impact later down the line.  Once committed to paper, however, a writer can never go back for a do-over.

For better or worse, we’re stuck with the story as it is.  All we can do now is decide if the series is worth putting these missteps behind us, and that depends entirely on what Oliver puts forward from this point on.  At the very least, he needs to do something drastic, and quick, to get us invested in either his protagonist or his concept, because neither as they stand right now are cut out for ongoing attachment.

Oliver doesn’t really succeed in either of these areas, but he does manage to give us a little more substance that we can work with.  Where our hero is concerned, the insights into his past don’t do much to make us any less indifferent to Adam, but they do give us some measure of understanding about where his distant personality comes from: the estrangement between his parents, his father’s sudden death, and his mother’s subsequent remarriage to a man whom Adam still refers to as “Whatshisname.”  Important as these things are to the shaping of his character, it’s his father’s fall from grace that has a place in FBP’s overarching story.

There do seem to be some classic overtones of conspiracy at work here.  Adam’s Uncle Eli recounts how his brother, Caleb, was one of the first to observe the rules of physics breaking down and how his attempts to warn the public resulted in the loss of his scientific credentials.  We also learn that at some point, the last of his research may have been taken by one Lance Blackwood, a name that is emphasized to be significant but which means nothing to us.  These developments seem to be pivoting Adam towards a new purpose of recovering and reviving his dad’s legacy, which may be the emotional hook FBP needs to be truly engaging.

Because right now, the series’ concepts are just not doing the job.  Oliver provides a fairly prosaic theory for where this degradation of physics comes from (the expansion of the universe: “It’s just like pizza dough, you stretch it too far, it gets thin…stretch it further, you get holes…and ‘up’—well, it ain’t fuckin’ ‘up’ anymore, man.”), and besides that, he doesn’t seem to be really playing with these ideas very much.  A quantum tornado doesn’t behave all that differently from a regular tornado; it travels in a straight line, wreaking destruction along its linear path, and suddenly changes course, all like your typical cyclone of wind.

What Oliver really needs to do is offer us something that requires actual scientific expertise, something that doesn’t read like a product anyone with a few creative writing courses under their belt can come up with.  Aside from the deficiencies in his original ideas, Oliver throws in a goodly number of clichés to flesh out the issue, whether it’s Caleb’s pre-death taped message, Eli’s misplaced feelings of guilt over his brother’s death, or this whole deal with Caleb’s missing (likely stolen) research—which is probably in the hands of FBP’s private competitor, if ACI and Caleb’s shared slogan about the “impossible is always possible” is anything to go by.

With such inadequacies in the script, Rodriguez’s art is the sole attractive feature of FBP at the moment.  Despite his loose, frail linework, he’s capable of conveying more detail and emotional subtlety than you might initially think.  That said, I have to wonder if he’s paying careful enough attention to the script, for there lacks consistency in the portrayal of the characters.  In the flashback sequence, two entirely different-looking characters are referred to as Eli, and the camerman’s facial hair appears to change from panel to panel.

Conclusion: This issue isn’t exactly the rehabilitative page-turner that it needs to be, despite being an incremental step in the right direction.  To stay off the Drop list, however, it’ll need to bring a lot more than that to the table.

Grade: C+

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – I really could have lived without that bit of racial tension at the end of the issue.  It comes out of nowhere and is a cheap way to make Rosa Reyes seem edgy and assertive.