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Review: The Five Fists of Science
The Five Fists of Science
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Steven Sanders
Published by Image Comics. $12.99 USD
In the mid-'80s, Alan Moore began a wave that changed the direction of comics with darker, more sophisticated and morally ambiguous Watchmen, Swamp Thing and Batman: The Killing Joke, the latter more influential than it had a right to be. And around the beginning of this century, he did it again, just as unintentionally, with the lighter, high concept League of Extraordinary Gentlemen miniseries, where Victorian fictional characters were portrayed as real, and brought together to find a common enemy. In some ways, Moore was still playing with the same toys--having fun making heroes and well-known figures get off with each other or do horrible things. These series have been both critically and commercially successful, so it's no wonder we've seen other comics creators trying their hand at similar ventures. Scarlet Traces treated H. G. Wells' Martians as a real menace to England. Jim Ottaviani bent real history to dramatic purpose to posit a fast-paced war between rival paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, with generally unnecessary cameos from P.T. Barnum, Ulysses S. Grant, Alexander Graham Bell and Buffalo Bill Cody, in Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards. And last year, Howard Chaykin and David Tischman made circus owner and charlatan P.T. Barnun into a secret agent, using his exploited freaks to stop evil scientist Nikola Tesla , in Barnum!: In Secret Service to the USA. And I seem to remember H.P. Lovecraft and other real historical figures pressed into heroic service in the forgettable Necronauts. It's a big trend, and apparently it's not going to end any time soon.
Speaking of Nik Tesla, he shows up here not as the villain but as the second banana to the natural lead, the colorful Mark Twain. Tesla is counterpoint to the smooth-talking, quick-thinking but unscientific Twain; he's more the brains of the outfit, a quiet ponderer given obsessive compulsive disorders like a need for 18 napkins during a meal rather than a real personality.
Twain, Tesla and Nobel Prize-winning Baroness Bertha von Suttner (laudably filling the traditional man of action role here in the third act, though for the first two just there to get the bookish Tesla laid) have a scheme whereby a giant robot suit will somehow cause world peace, and trying to stop them are a cabal of evil old men made up of financier J.P. Morgan, steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, and wrongly-credited inventor of the telegraph, Guglielmo Marconi, who defects to the good guys side when he discovers Morgan plans to kill him, and who is also given a personality disorder instead of a personality--he eats when he's stressed.
Sanders has the makings of quite a good artist--most of the work is fine here, though his faces are not that consistent yet and a would-be dramatic sequence early on, where Tesla tests an invention at night, is very unclear. The robot sequences are enjoyable, doubly so since they provide a respite from so many scenes of men with facial hair, stiff collars and dark suits yammering away. For all the talk of science, there is little of it here, and the real menace is a summoned demon, which is much easier to write.
Fraction is engaged and many scenes begin or end with a good laugh, but he fails to make the book actually suspenseful. The characters and their motivations, dreams, etc. are not properly established, so we don't care. It doesn't feel like a real world, so why care if it's in jeopardy? Our heroes plan is just as stupid and illogical as the villains' summoning a demon to destroy the world, so, again, who cares? All the Victorian lettering and jokey frontispiece would be a delightful bonus if they framed a coherent, thrilling story, but in its absence, one can't help but think too much time was spent on the wrong things. There's nothing wrong with devoting oneself to writing genre material, even genre material with a tongue planted firmly in cheek, recognizing the genre's conventions and tweaking them a bit, but while the reader is in that world, you have to be able to get them to care.
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Steven Sanders
Published by Image Comics. $12.99 USD
In the mid-'80s, Alan Moore began a wave that changed the direction of comics with darker, more sophisticated and morally ambiguous Watchmen, Swamp Thing and Batman: The Killing Joke, the latter more influential than it had a right to be. And around the beginning of this century, he did it again, just as unintentionally, with the lighter, high concept League of Extraordinary Gentlemen miniseries, where Victorian fictional characters were portrayed as real, and brought together to find a common enemy. In some ways, Moore was still playing with the same toys--having fun making heroes and well-known figures get off with each other or do horrible things. These series have been both critically and commercially successful, so it's no wonder we've seen other comics creators trying their hand at similar ventures. Scarlet Traces treated H. G. Wells' Martians as a real menace to England. Jim Ottaviani bent real history to dramatic purpose to posit a fast-paced war between rival paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, with generally unnecessary cameos from P.T. Barnum, Ulysses S. Grant, Alexander Graham Bell and Buffalo Bill Cody, in Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards. And last year, Howard Chaykin and David Tischman made circus owner and charlatan P.T. Barnun into a secret agent, using his exploited freaks to stop evil scientist Nikola Tesla , in Barnum!: In Secret Service to the USA. And I seem to remember H.P. Lovecraft and other real historical figures pressed into heroic service in the forgettable Necronauts. It's a big trend, and apparently it's not going to end any time soon.
Speaking of Nik Tesla, he shows up here not as the villain but as the second banana to the natural lead, the colorful Mark Twain. Tesla is counterpoint to the smooth-talking, quick-thinking but unscientific Twain; he's more the brains of the outfit, a quiet ponderer given obsessive compulsive disorders like a need for 18 napkins during a meal rather than a real personality.
Twain, Tesla and Nobel Prize-winning Baroness Bertha von Suttner (laudably filling the traditional man of action role here in the third act, though for the first two just there to get the bookish Tesla laid) have a scheme whereby a giant robot suit will somehow cause world peace, and trying to stop them are a cabal of evil old men made up of financier J.P. Morgan, steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, and wrongly-credited inventor of the telegraph, Guglielmo Marconi, who defects to the good guys side when he discovers Morgan plans to kill him, and who is also given a personality disorder instead of a personality--he eats when he's stressed.
Sanders has the makings of quite a good artist--most of the work is fine here, though his faces are not that consistent yet and a would-be dramatic sequence early on, where Tesla tests an invention at night, is very unclear. The robot sequences are enjoyable, doubly so since they provide a respite from so many scenes of men with facial hair, stiff collars and dark suits yammering away. For all the talk of science, there is little of it here, and the real menace is a summoned demon, which is much easier to write.
Fraction is engaged and many scenes begin or end with a good laugh, but he fails to make the book actually suspenseful. The characters and their motivations, dreams, etc. are not properly established, so we don't care. It doesn't feel like a real world, so why care if it's in jeopardy? Our heroes plan is just as stupid and illogical as the villains' summoning a demon to destroy the world, so, again, who cares? All the Victorian lettering and jokey frontispiece would be a delightful bonus if they framed a coherent, thrilling story, but in its absence, one can't help but think too much time was spent on the wrong things. There's nothing wrong with devoting oneself to writing genre material, even genre material with a tongue planted firmly in cheek, recognizing the genre's conventions and tweaking them a bit, but while the reader is in that world, you have to be able to get them to care.
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