Writer: Bruce Jones
Artist: Renato Guedes
Publisher: DC Comics
There comes a time when carelessness in the creation of a comic book becomes so great that I just can’t keep reading it, no matter what virtues the story may have. And when mounting plot absurdities become as towering as they are in these latest two issues of the OMAC 8-issue mini, I definitely feel like I’ve wasted my money.
How’s this for carelessness? Brother Eye – the satellite, that is – was destroyed in Infinite Crisis. A whole jumbo-sized supplementary special to The OMAC Project series surrounded the fate of its rotting hulk, found in the desert. Yet OMAC #3 finds the last surviving OMAC unit Mike Costner flying up to the satellite in orbit. Shining silver, not a hint of battle damage, evil eye aglow. Only, pages later, the satellite is drawn differently, as a pile of space garbage magnetically pulled together and knitted into a new home for Brother Eye’s intelligence in a leap of comic book techno-science that frankly strains my suspension of disbelief beyond its limits. It even has an anti-matter power drive, we are told, with which it is able to fire an incineration beam from orbit (more on that in a moment).
This glaring breach of single-issue internal continuity is fairly astonishing. I can only imagine the art snafu is due to Guedes drawing the early pages of the issue from a partial script, or failing to do any homework on the last known fate of Brother Eye, or being told by DC editorial that it wasn’t worth the time to go back to the early offending pages and correct his error, because sales were so atrocious it wasn’t worth the extra effort. For one of the six titles that DC had obviously banked heavily on through their loss-leader Brave New World promotion, this sort of carelessness suggests they’ve already recognized the commercial futility of the effort.
But wait, I’m just getting started on the gripes.
Issue #3 also features what was certainly intended to be a raucously entertaining aerial fight between the last OMAC and a fleet of U.S. fighter jets. Hmm. Strangely, they’re flying KOREAN WAR ERA F-86 SABRES!!! What the...? Screw artistic license. Doesn’t anybody know what contemporary fighters look like? “Hey, this plane looks cool! I think I’ll draw it! Thank goodness for Google image search!” I suppose I should just be grateful they weren’t MiGs.
It gets worse. The planes fire their external fuel tanks like missiles. Yeah. They’re drawn perfectly well, all the details of your standard fat, bloated wing tanks look about right. But Guedes has them flying like missiles. Good God in heaven. Preserve us from such ignorance.
Let’s see, what else. Oh, Brother Eye’s cobbled-together anti-matter-powered laser beam (a little trifle he no doubt brewed up in his spare moments out of floating wrenches, bags of astronaut urine and other little baubles of space junk) gets its first test run when Brother Eye attempts to incinerate Batman on the prowl in Gotham City. Only he misses by about an inch and disintegrates an ordinary thug just about to enjoy the receiving end of the Dark Knight’s fist.
So Brother Eye can build an anti-matter super gun, but he can’t aim, right? And what does this portend for the internal logic of Brother Eye’s initial plans for extermination of the metas, that overwrought, excessively complicated idea of spending decades surreptitiously inserting nanostuff into hundreds of thousands of poor vaccine patients and turning them into his army? (Please don’t shake the slightly crumbling plot edifice of Infinite Crisis! I rather liked that story!) Why didn’t he just build a Star Trek disintegration phaser from the start, and take care of the planned annihilation in a matter of hours?
For that matter, with these kinds of utterly invincible threats to our heroes floating around in space, how can there still be any heroes at all? Better that such things be politely ignored.
These are just my quibbles so far. I don’t have the energy to discuss just how banal the unfolding plot is thus far, with its flat attempts at edginess (“Look! We have strippers and druggies!”), the deflation of any plot suspense (“Will Marty Stu defeat the evil computer trying to control his mind and turn from a life of petty thievery and drug-induced stupor to make something of himself and save the heroes?”), and the frequent difficulties in following the action of the art (“We have big explosions! And girls with boobs!”).
OMAC #4 was my last issue of the series, though I’ll at least flip through #8 a few months from now to see whether anything important happens, relative to future events in the DCU.
I have enjoyed Bruce Jones’ work on occasion, and Renato Guedes did well on his Superman work, with the potential to become one of the better artists in the game. But it’s a travesty to have Jack Kirby’s name in the credits as a legacy “creator” of this shoddy product.
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