‘Plastic Man’ #1 a long-awaited dream project realized to perfection

By Brandy Dykhuizen. Our Week In Review sums up our weekly comic book coverage while taking time for a new review or two before it’s all over. This week: ‘Plastic Man’ #1 and ‘Eternity Girl’ #4.

Plastic Man #1

DC Comics/$3.99

Written by Gail Simone.

Art by Adriana Melo.

Colors by Kelly Fitzpatrick.

Letters by Simon Bowland.

Somewhere between goofy and gritty, crook and crime fighter, veteran and noob, Plastic Man keeps a toe in many worlds, too new at this game to be ready to commit to any of them. But when you can physically pull yourself that thin, you’ve got a little leeway to work with before you make those big decisions.

Gail Simone gives Eel O’Brian jokes aplenty, but keeps it reeled in just shy of the incessant smartassery for which some of the other iterations of this superhero are known. Plastic Man has to keep things light to survive, what with the pall of his mysterious past bearing down so heavily on him and all. You can hardly begrudge the guy a “your mom” joke here or there.

Adriana Melo’s art and Kelly Fitzpatrick’s colors pair perfectly with the dark/light dichotomy that provides Plastic Man his foundation. It’s a pretty sinister origin story that Eel begins to suss out – a literal nightmare that keeps ripping him from sleep. Melo and Fitzpatrick create a dirty, dark, crime-addled city as the hellish backdrop for our hero to go bouncing around in the form of a giant, self-satisfied rubber ball. The effect is great – Eel O’Brian is his own bubble, and the grime and pain of the surrounding city can hardly penetrate such a defense.

Plastic Man has plenty of surprises – the story bounces around as much as the man himself, through flashbacks and dreams, back to the conflicts and hoodwinks of the present, and lands on a perfectly unsuspected cliffhanger. He may not be the cream of the crop, but you do end up rooting for the poor guy. Plastic Man promises to be yet another big hit from Gail Simone, a long-awaited dream project realized to perfection.

8 out of 10

Check out this 6-page preview of ‘Plastic Man’ #1, courtesy of DC Comics!

Eternity Girl #4

DC’s Young Animal/$3.99

Written by Magdalene Visaggio.

Art by Sonny Liew.

Colors by Chris Chuckry.

Letters by Todd Klein.

Have you ever had an existential crisis? The kind of stare-at-the-wall trance that migrates from playback to possibility? Maybe if you had shouldered your responsibility differently, you wouldn’t be in direct conflict with the one force that could cause you to explode. You play it back in your head a thousand times: the phrase you regret saying or the esprit d’escalier you wish you’d had in your back pocket at the right moment. These things have a tendency to skip and loop, transforming the same tired beat into endless iterations of what could have been.

Intoxicating, isn’t it? Magdalene Visaggio lays out how our perceptions of reality can all be connected with the appropriate segue – or go horribly, horribly awry with the introduction of a sour note. Not only can our timelines shift, our own identities can drift between what is expected of us and the paths we carve out for ourselves.

Eternity Girl drops a sick beat with its insistence that, no matter how many Prufrockian faces you prepare, you’re still gonna end up as you. Sonny Liew leads us through eight potentialities of Caroline, who will never not be a walking nuke, yet can still inhabit endless personas. It’s a reminder that, no matter what sort of lot you’re dealt with in life, you still have the ability to choose how you handle the outcome. Would you be the type to put off the inevitable or blow shit up? It’s a tough decision to have to make, but it certainly makes for a fantastic story.

8 out of 10

Check out this six-page preview of ‘Eternity Girl’ #4, courtesy of DC Comics!