Written by Drew Melbourne
Art by Yvel Guichet and Joe Rubenstein
Published by Dark Horse
This is a funny-book, a comic book with an absurd situation and a strong thread of humour. It is also the story of a super hero and a super villain. They are, as tradition would demand, quite young though Ethan, the Hero, at least has a job. Unusually, they are also flatmates and unaware of each other’s secret identities. What follows could be good. The Tony Harris style art and bright colouring make for an engaging ‘look’, but there is a sense of having seen all this before and better in the pages of Spider-man, but without the back story and the emotional resonance that brings.
The hero, Star Fighter/Ethan is cut from the same cloth as a plethora of others. When in costume he is powerful, assertive and confident. When in civilian garb he is a normal person in his late teens with a crappy job and a shared apartment.
The villain Underlord/Vincent seems to spend his entire time in the flat. His criminal activities are conducted through robotic avatars and henchmen. His criminal activities do not appear to be very lucrative, if this is the sort of life he leads, obsessively cleaning up after his untidy flatmate and bitching about the mess. We see Underlord trying to gain acceptance into some form of criminal fraternity and we see Ethan host a party in his flat, but there is very little of depth to either of the characters.
In short, while this book has the potential to be an amusing diversion it is far from essential. It is well drawn and certainly isn’t badly written, but it delivers nothing new or particularly interesting. Dark Horse doesn’t have a great track record for delivering costume clad capers and this book does nothing to change that.
John Davidson Despite working in IT for the last 20 years and collecting comics for even longer, he is married, has two young daughters and lives in Scotland. Ideally he spends his spare time reading and watching movies, but this is curtailed by the calls of child-rearing and part-time study, not to mention the 'call of the internet'.