The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 790: Metallix Free Comic Book Day #1, April 2003

A blast from Free Comic Book Days past today. Metallix is an interesting premise, in that it's a superhero team book but the superpowers are shared amongst the four members of the team. What I mean is that only one character at a time can wear the supersuit, and each brings their own unique abilities to the enhancements granted by "Metal X." It's actually pretty cool, and I really want to track down the rest of the series to see how it all plays out. The team is set up as an industrial troubleshooting team, and in this issue we see them taking down saboteurs in a Central American country. This is a little troubling, as there's a good chance that the saboteurs are actually people from the country fighting to keep industry from destroying the environment, but there's no hint of motive behind the saboteurs, just explosions and gunfire. It's a bit of a gap in the storytelling, really. Even the most mundane of crooks always seems to have a reason, and it's only the truly terrifying, and rare, villains that do things with no reason whatsoever.

That aside, the comic reads quite nicely, and that's because it's produced by a group of veteran creators, all old school (well, 70s and 80s) Marvel guys. And the comic bears this out. The art style really looks like it could have come out of Marvel in the mid-Eighties, which is perhaps another reason I enjoyed it so much. It's got that old Avengers/New Mutants look going for it. There are three other preview features in the comic, none as long as the Metallix story, and I'm curious as to whether or not these comics were an interlinked universe, or if each existed in their own continuum. There's no hint either way in this comic, but I get the feeling, especially based on the credentials of the creators, that what we're looking at is a shared universe. I will, again, have to track things down a bit to figure that out.

Well, I'm off for a septoplasty operation today. I've never had a general anesthetic, so I'm a little bit freaked out. But I'll see you back here tomorrow, probably in a bit of pain, but ready for more weird comics from the second quarter of the collection. To be continued!