Sunday, October 9, 2016

BubbleGun, Volume 1 Review


BubbleGun, Volume 1: Heist Jinks. Mark Roslan, Mike Bowden, David Curiel, and Josh Reed. 2016. Aspen MLT, Inc. 136 pages.

Rating: 3/5

I received this book in the July 2016 Comic Bento box. The version included in this box came with a variant cover on the trade, which is pretty cool. It seems like Aspen does this regularly for Comic Bento. The books in the box featured robots, but this book really only has cyborgs, which are closely related I guess.

Anyway, Heist Jinks is about a group of thieves, sort of like Ocean's Eleven or the Italian Job, with high tech gadgets. They steal a mysterious package for a client, beating out a rival team along the way. With added interest in the package, they ask for more money, but things quickly unravel for them.

This is a pretty fast paced book with plenty of action. The story isn't wholly original, but the package itself and why each of the different factions want it is well thought out. Sometimes the characters fall into certain stereotypes, which isn't bad in and of itself. It just might not be appealing to some readers.

The illustrations didn't thrill me. There are some cool sequences, but there is also some objectification of women. Two things about the book excited me though. The first is the colorist. The colors used for this book are amazing. They capture the tone and setting perfectly. It can be a bit over the top, but that is exactly what this book needed. The second thing I liked came from the letterer. Instead of using the traditional expletive symbols, there were images to convey what the speaker meant without using the curse words. I don't know if this is something he just decided to do or if it's something Aspen does in general, but I thought it was really clever.

I do recommend this book to anyone that wants an action packed, cyberpunk story and doesn't mind that it might be shallow.

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