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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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 PLEASE SUPPORT COMIC BOOK GALAXY BY VISITING OUR SPONSORS
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Our main character Richard finds himself in an increasingly bizarre predicament. Not only is he infatuated with a pin up girl who he’s never met, but he might just be falling in love with the hooker he pays to dress up like said pin up girl. To top it off, Richard has been delivered a mysterious box which, if unopened, may have the power to create a perfect world. Soon, he finds himself the target of several factions who want to get their hands on the box, including his pin up girl turned FBI agent, a vampire priest, and Winston Golden, the world’s richest man. While each of these characters fits into a classic archetype (femme fatale, creature of the night, and wealthy lord) they each break the mold in the short time they appear thanks to the writer.
While Matthew K. Manning has done some work for both DC and Marvel, I first became familiar with his work through his last Meat Haus book Getting the Sex Out of the Way. Both in that story and here, Manning tells stories with a psudo-science fiction background relying more on character and conflict than on laser guns and time travel. While each of the supporting cast is derivative of past tropes, Manning gives all of them a little piece of humanity. Our pin up girl turned agent suffers a life of awkward stares since her conceited nature caused her head to expand, our vampire priest is prone to manic mood swings where he questions the faith he is sworn to but can also destroy him, and our dashing rich man has become the folly of chasing fashion trends, as a pirate’s peg leg has seriously debilitated him. Most important of all, Manning gives us a sympathetic protagonist in the confused Richard, who is forced to fend for his life through chase scenes and assassination attempts.
The art by Meat Haus regular Robert Donnelly has a sketchy quality, but its abstract quality is its greatest strength. Rather than make the advanced society a glimmering paradise, the buildings and people of this future New York are almost squeezed onto the page in a hodge podge sort of way, and in the background, we get to see a repeated theme of abstract shapes in the design of everything from cabinets to liquor bottles. This messy collage style carries over to the characters who in some ways resemble their inspirations while alternately carrying their own grotesque flaws right on their faces. A favorite trick used by Donnelly comes when the vampire turns into mist. Rather than simply turn into a poof of smoke, the character slowly abstracts into a flat blob over the course of several panels and oozes out under a door.
There are a few glaring flaws in the book. A scene where a wave of cell phone rings somehow warn Richard of an impending bomb makes little sense (although the idea is kind of fun), and more importantly, the ending falls flat as the resolution provides a plot ending, but leaves the story a little too free of context. In the end, the ambiguity of the ending does oddly fit with the rest of the work, just as the cast oddly fit into this future world, leaving the reader content if confused. 4/5
-- Kiel Phegley
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This single issue story takes place in a future society that more closely resembles a 1930s Hollywood future than anything we’d expect to evolve from our world today, and the story itself holds more than a few superficial qualities one might associate with classic genre pictures. However, the story succeeds because its creative team knows how to pull their characters out of mere nostalgic trappings and into the realm of honest emotional conflict.