Where Walks the Cyber Bear!

Buck Rogers #1

I wasn’t actually planning on picking this one up, but I flipped through it and found one specific thing that guaranteed I’d be bringing it home.

This is essentially a new, rebooted origin for Buck Rogers, the swashbuckling sci-fi pulp hero who got his start back in the late ’20s. Much of the story is fairly familiar — hot-headed pilot Buck Rogers is accidentally put into suspended animation aboard his experimental spaceship and wakes up several hundred years in the future. Not knowing where (or when) he is, he crashlands his ship in a convenient stretch of forest and is rescued by Colonel Wilma Deering. Unfortunately, they’re both stuck in a hunting zone used by an organization called the Pack, and they both get attacked by one of the Pack hunters…

Let that soak in — a cybernetically enhanced grizzly bear with a raygun.

Yes, welcome to your shiny, futuristic new home in Awesometown.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Yes, yes, the cyber-bear is fun, but as for the rest of the story… I’m cautiously optimistic. So far, the writing is solid and the art is solid. Can they keep this going, with or without awesome cyber-bears? Let’s hope so.

Secret Six #10

The Six get hired by someone claiming to be their old benefactor, Mockingbird, to escort a large and dangerous-looking box to a jungle compound. It quickly becomes clear (to the readers, particularly, if not the team itself) that the folks who just hired them are particularly cruel slavers, willing to execute any number of their workers just to punish a single rebellious slave. Of course, the Six aren’t really very nice people — they’re doing the job so they can get paid, not because they want to work with fine, upstanding citizens. But do the slavers have some unpleasant plans for the Six themselves? On top of that, Scandal Savage and Bane continue to grow closer, and the extremely weird romance between Deadshot and Jeanette keeps getting weirder.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Our main villains’ ruthlessness is demonstrated very brutally in the first four pages of the comic, and again, more unexpectedly, in the last two. These are definitely rotten customers, and I’ve got my fingers crossed that a few of them get entertainingly killed before the end of the storyarc. Also, excellent dialogue and characterization for Bane, Scandal, Deadshot, and Jeanette.