By: Simon Oliver (story), Robbi Rodriguez (art), Rico Renzi (colors)
The Story: Not even the dilation of time itself will get in the way of Monday Night Wrestling.
The Review: Even though Jay was still a rudimentary sort of character by the end of his short-lived fictional life, killing him off did remove an important cog from the title. Without him, there’s no buffer between the book-smart Cicero and street-smart Adam—which isn’t such a bad thing, since we’ve seen that kind of buddy-cop dynamic work out plenty of times before. But it’s because that dynamic has become so common that a third, balancing force is needed
Enter Agent Rosa Reyes, who adds a female presence to the FBP sausage-fest in addition to taking a central position between Adam and Cicero. But rather than playing mediator, she actually unites her male partners with her socially stunted personality, unsettling even Cicero, who’s no extrovert himself. At the least, Rosa drives Adam and Cicero to bond over their mutual bafflement. Says Adam, “And let me take a moment to apologize for ever suggesting you might have a touch of Asperger’s…”
Despite her slightly caricaturized qualities, Rosa arrives with more complexity in her character than either of our other lead characters. Her efforts to make small talk, pitiful as they are, and the way she stalks off after catching Adam and Cicero discussing her social ineptitude, reveal a woman who’s at least slightly aware and perhaps regretful over her faults. She doesn’t lack compassion, either; her offer to be a confidential sounding board to one seemingly troubled client proves that. There’s clearly more to Rosa than awkward, inappropriate lines.
If Rosa seems as dimensional as she does, it’s perhaps due to her origins, which are even more interesting and locked tight within FBP’s physics-weirdness than the death of Adam’s father by quantum tornado. Her difficulty in relating with others may be the natural side-effect of having spent her life’s first moments in another world entirely. Of course, that begs the intriguing questions of where she went and how she got back.
Certainly her mysteries are far more interesting than Adam’s, which revolve around discovering the role one Lance Blackwood played in his father’s life. Fortunately, Oliver keeps this ongoing plotline to a minimum in the issue, focusing on what he should have been focused on from the start, which is the FBP’s daily activity. Reduced to basically another underresourced social service agency after the privatization of the physics-control market, the FBP finds itself forced to please even the most ignorant clients just to hold on to its last scraps of relevance.
Oliver would be wise, however, to start digging deeper into the physics strangeness which is supposedly the foundation of his title. Time-dilations sound fancy at first, until you realize that it manifests as fast-running clocks. We need more impact than that, and definitely more than just an irritable building super missing his wrestling match. If time runs faster in one area compared to the rest of the world, shouldn’t there be more serious effects to the people living there?
Rodriguez’s loose and pliable style of art somehow always manages to say above the overtly cartoony. Even when takes some blatant liberties with certain character features (Cicero’s hair being one), he renders the rest of his figures with a very respectable amount of intricacy and detail. Overall, the imagery is so easily pleasing and sleek that even though the issue is mostly a series of talking heads, you get plenty of visual stimulation anyway, no less because of Renzi’s striking juxtaposition of colors: bubbles of neon blue floating through a reddish-orange monochrome, goldenrod and pastel-green against a deep purple background.
Conclusion: Not that the addition of one character suddenly completes the title, but it does even out the tone of the series. That, along with a tightening of the plot, makes for another noticeably improved issue.
Grade: B-
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – I’d be a lot less calm than Cicero had I been on the receiving end of that moronic super’s wrath. “Hey, if you think we’re so incapable of helping you out, why don’t you shell out some money to get the corporate folks down here? Just make sure they cover pre-existing conditions in their insurance plan.”
Grade
Conclusion