Remember all those annoying DC reviews? They were basically just my short opinion about the title? Well I'm doing that for Pilot Season. Here's three more reviews as I put my thoughts down for the Beauty which Kevin and I discussed on the second episode of the podcast. You can also read his review for The Test on the site.
Misdirection
I sat here staring at a blank screen trying to think of a nice way to describe what this book is about and the best I can come up with is he’s the stupidest race car driver in the world. This book is one part Transporter and one part… well actually it’s just the Transporter only he’s stupid so he’s suckered into the whole “driving for a job” thing. I really couldn’t find anything interesting in this book. The main character was dumb and I couldn’t even begin to sympathize with him considering he put himself in his predicament and the worst part is that by listening to peer-pressure from someone that clearly wanted him out of their way. The dialog didn’t even try to hide that fact yet the main character was so one-dimensional that he couldn’t figure it out. The book ends on a cliff-hanger but if you’ve seen any movie that has its main character doing something criminal against their will then you already know how the book ends. So don’t vote for this book, don’t vote for any of the “Pilot Season” titles since the entire competition is asinine. Also, it’s just Transporter!
Fleshdigger
Again… I sat here thinking of a nice way to describe this book, but it really boils down to the Crow meets Al Simmons. Not Spawn, but Al Simmons. I feel for the team behind this book and frankly they probably could have gotten it published via Image instead of wasting their time on Pilot Season. I get the impression from their Twitter feed that their hungry for more work and sadly… that’s not going to happen any time soon even if they win Pilot Season. My problems with this book include: Rushed story (due to the one-shot nature for sure), bad character dialog, a problematic origin story and most of all “Rule Breaking.” That’s the term I’m coining right here and right now. I’ve mentioned it before and it’s something that Kevin and I always talk about, be it in video games, movies or most notorious… comic books. “Rule Breaking” is when you establish the norm for a character and then have them break that norm after establish they can never break the norm.
Character: “I never open that door on Thursday.”
Thursday rolls around and sure enough the character opens the fucking door.
The rule breaking in this book is as dumb. Our main character works out sparring at his local boxing gym (I guess those are local in huge Metropolis’) and he gets a good one in on his sparring partner. The man then tells the main character that, “That shit wouldn’t fly in the streets.” To which the main character replies, “That’s why I only fight inside with rules and blah, blah, blah.” Then in the very next scene he gets into a street fight because a woman is getting drag around and smacked. Also his phone gets no 911 reception… I don’t even know how that’s possible especially since he was in a city park or some shit. The rest of the story is downhill from there. I really thought this would be the book I liked from “Pilot Season”, but it’s not… not by a long shot.
The Beauty
I liked the concept of this book and that was about it. The characters and the world they’re set in are too ridiculous for me to take series and the “hook” or cliffhanger of the issue made me laugh. You’re not supposed to laugh at it, but I did. The Beauty is the only STD you want to get, overnight you’ll shed the pounds, grow your hair back and become beautiful. That’s what it’s about. For some reason the police for has a “Beauty Department” (stay with me here) to investigate all Beauty related deaths. Beauty has swept the world and is now roughly half the population, but they create a task force consisting of two people to handle it all? At that point, isn’t just normal crime? Here’s the ending since I already talked about it on the podcast, his wife infects him. Hilarious that his wife would go out and get an STD just as he’s discovering that it’s as deadly as it is attractive, she’s a genius and a piece of shit. -- Well there you have it, Pilot Season thus far. I think there are three more issues coming out so we’ll probably just bundle them all together again unless one of them really stands out… expect that bundle.