Revolutionaries #1

Writer: John Barber

Artist: Fico Ossio

Colors: Sebastian Cheng

Publisher: IDW

I came to this book sight-unseen, and it’s the first time in awhile that I’ve actually been sorry I did so. I feel a wee bit bad to admit that it’s running into a bit of a blind spot of mine - I’m not a fan of G.I. Joe or the Transformers. Oh sure, the toys themselves were cool (my Barbie had quite a few hookups with good ol’ Joe back in the day, hee!) but the half-hour toy commercials masquerading as cartoons that ran on after-school TV in my youth were the bane of my existence. The animation was awful, the dialogue was clunky, and they kept me from being able to watch whole episodes of my beloved classic Star Trek. 

So it’s with this background that I looked at the illustrated timeline that opens this story and just mentally groaned. I know that Barber is trying to do his readers a favor, as it can be kind of hard to tell all the players without a scorecard. I saw the character names and got the old G.I. Joe animated series theme song stuck in my head; I was only able to dislodge it with judicious application of the “Hamilton” Broadway cast album. All of that being said, this book didn’t actually suck. Ossio’s art is pretty to look at, and I was especially willing to give the story a chance on the strength of the image of the pretty hipster girl with dog and ice cream cone. And then everything just sort of all runs together. It’s the standard “space-marines have to shoot everything that moves but not really” plot that runs through interminable triple-A video game titles. 

However, for what it is, it’s not half bad. I particularly appreciated the acknowledgement from Heavy Duty at the beginning of the adventure that folks who look like him (people of color) don’t tend to fare well in horror films. That was a bit of self-awareness I wasn’t expecting from G.I Joe or Transformers. Nor was I quite expecting baddies who bore more than a passing resemblance to the creatures from the Alien movies, but with nastier fangs. 

I will say that for my particular tastes, the art is the best part of the book. The opening and closing pages were my favorites, particularly the image of Action Man in a space suit marooned on a frozen world with nothing but the ruins of a Cobra landing site. Anyone who’s seen “The Martian” will have an added appreciation for his terror, and Ossio conveyed it brilliantly on the poor guy’s face. I also dug the sheer reflectivity of the face shield on his space helmet - Ossio and Cheng used pen and ink to make it *shine*. All in all, this is a better-than-average read for fans of G.I. Joe, Transformers, or Halo-style space marine video games.