10.10.12 Reviews (Image Edition)

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Think Tank #3 (Image): Matt Hawkins and Rahsan Ekedal offer the right mix of brains and style here without it coming off like smarmy fluff. There’s substance behind some fantastical ideas that are surprisingly rooted in real science and entertaining technology, from UAVs to cutting edge chemical warfare. At its heart, it’s about one man finding his passion and purpose and trying to exercise free will while others try to pull him in other directions. It’s peppered with interesting zingers in the dialogue like “They can’t report the truth. No one would believe it.” There’s maybe a little too much Dark Knight this and Michal Corleone that, Obi-Wan Kenobi over here, and Clint Eastwood over there for me; it really wears its pop culture on its sleeve, but it’s also very observant about the way people act and the way things actually work. This issue is essentially one long escape sequence which plays like a cool heist movie. Grade A-.

Point of Impact #1 (Image): If you want the quick version of this review in just one word: Yawn. Here’s the explanatory take: Mitchell Rafferty is having a really bad day. Someone kills his wife, breaks into his house and beats the shit out of him, then it turns out his wife was cheating on him, and now she appears to be implicated in some larger insidious plot. I called the little twist ending as it was happening, so I guess that means it’s predictable. The art from Koray Kuranel is mostly nice, but there’s a few spots you can’t distinguish the men, but I will say the panel breakdowns are interesting. It’s a decent story, but I’m kinda’ just tired of these generic crime things that play like interchangeable episodes of CSI or Law & Order. It’s not bad, but I won’t remember it 30 minutes from now. Writer Jay Faerber then spends an entire page full of three-column text describing just such a TV show. I don’t really want to read comics I can see on TV. I want to read comics I can’t see on TV. You also have to question the wisdom of emulating something that was quickly cancelled on TV. It’s basically just a TV pitch that’s not disguised very well, with stock characters, that’s not terribly memorable. Point of Impact? More like Low Impact. Grade B-.