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MICRONAUTS #1
Mildly Recommended (5/10)
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Image Comics/Devil's Due Publishing
Writer: Scott Wherle
Pencils: Eric Wolfe Hanson
Inks: Barbara Schulz & Clayton Brown
Colors: Hi-Fi Colour Design
Letters: Dreamer Design
Price: $2.95 US/$4.50 CAN |
This toy/comic-book revival comes courtesy the guys at Devil's Due, the same crew that made a huge splash with the resurrection of G.I. Joe last year. That book didn't really hold my attention, but given its foundation in nostalgia and my lack of nostalgia for the Joes, I wasn't the intended audience anyway. The same can be said of Micronauts. I have some vague memories of some Micronauts toys as a small child, but none of the characters or premise, and I didn't find anything in this new first issue to spark an interest now either.
A research team in Death Valley, Nevada investigates a spacial rift, and at a critical point of one experiment, something comes through the rift from the other side...
something altogether unpleasant. Ryan Archer, son of one of the scientists, finds himself abducted and imprisoned on an alien, high-tech landscape, a domain ruled by the cruel Baron Karza. Ryan also meets an apparently robotic warrior who faces the same unfortunate circumstances as the young Earth man.
Hanson certainly brings a strong level of detail to bear in his art here, but somehow, like the story, it fails to grab me. The designs don't strike me as being particularly inventive or new. I wasn't awestruck by the weirdness and vastness of the alien city in which the characters find themselves either. Mind you, the colors are bright, crisp and energetic. They convey the power of the alien technology and the dark nature of Karza's troops.
The soon-to-be hero of this story is a rather ho-hum figure. I really don't get a sense of who he is in this first issue, and that's true of just about every other player in this sci-fi drama. I'll admit that the writer has piqued my curiosity about the unspoken special nature of one of the Karza prisoners, but only mildly so.
It's not that this is a poorly illustrated or written comic book. It's competent, but it just doesn't stand out. I don't know if the creators are just following in the footsteps of those who worked on Marvel's Micronauts books years ago. But they're definitely treading some familiar sci-fi terrority here. The premise is rather cliched, and the characters aren't fleshed out enough to distract the reader from that fact.
Note: This comic book was not among this week's new releases.
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