If ever a book needed a subtitle it’s The Infinite, something along the lines of the “Sadness” or even “Torture.” The book pairs Image ex-founder Rob Liefeld with current Image partner Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) on a Sci-Fi, 90’s X-Force inspired tale about two soldiers in the future fighting against a “villain” named Imperius who has come from the future and taken over the planet. Or if you chose to believe his version he’s there to save the planet. Bo is one of the last soldiers left to oppose Imperius and as they face off his time traveling belt is grabbed by Bo. He uses it to travel to the past to recruit himself and his now dead friend to begin the fight against Imperius early.
There are numerous problems with this story the first problem being the narration and timeline. Any story that deals with time travel needs to have a clear and concise timeline otherwise elements of the story will end up confusing or come off wrong in the narration. For instance, Bo escapes Imerius by traveling back in time and appears outside of past Bo’s hotel room before a fight. To the reader this is the sequence of events in chronological order. Yet later, future Bo explains time travel and why he can’t go into the future as if he’s a seasoned traveler. How that truly reads is that the Kirkman just made future Bo an expert on something he couldn’t possibly have any knowledge of.
Kirkman’s writing in general is even worse than Super Dinosaur, which was so bad that I wanted to buy the book just rip it in half. His narration is basically just exposition explaining every detail of the story and really the book doesn’t have any resemblance of his writing style. What’s more likely is that Kirkman just filled in the dialog to whatever Liefeld drew and instead of caption boxes they choose to have the characters say everything. The scene that really did the writing in for me was the hotel fight scene. Four guys show up to beat the shit out of Bo because he brought a woman to the hotel. Apparently this is Bo’s M.O. as one of the men’s sisters also experienced One Night in Bo as well. This makes them want to fight each other… for some reason. The real explanation sounded like an afterthought so I’m not really inclined to believe that it had any relevance other than to have future Bo show up and change the past.
Then there’s the art… by Robert Liefeld. If he hasn’t been dubbed “Worst Comic Artist Ever” then let me give him the title right now. There’s no need to have an official competition because everyone will agree. Not only has Liefled’s art not improved over the years, it’s actually gotten worse. There was one particular image of Bo that actually gave me a headache. Why? Because my brain was actually trying to correct the image and couldn’t... it was that jacked up. The image is on page 7 and is one of the numerous scenes in which Bo is yelling with his mouth wide open. The eyes are just off centered enough that as your own eyes try to fix the image to something they understand, but then your eyes twitch! That’s right your brain and eyes can’t handle it so they twitch. I’m pretty sure this will work with anyone if you stare at it long enough and if not then it at least happened to me. Other than that, usual Liefeld annoyances are present like ballerina feet that float above the ground, baby headed characters, pouches that couldn’t possible hold anything, guns that would be unable to fire without exploding in the persons hands, Deadpool looking masks and of course heavy shadows to cover details even though no lighting source could possible make that much darkness in the day.
There is going to be people out there that enjoy this comic hailing it as a “B-Movie” of comics and they’re wrong. In fact they’re stupid if they think that. This comic is just bad and the story is so transparent that I’m going to spoil it for you. The good guys are wrong and the bad guys are right and more than likely Imperius is future, future Bo because this whole storyline reeks of recycled X-Force storylines. I wish I could say one positive thing about this project that has so many excited, but all I can muster is at least I don’t have to read it ever again.
Score: WTF
Writer: Robert Kirkman
Artist: Rob Liefeld
Publisher: Skybound Entertainment and Image Comics