Sad to say, but I feel like this series fizzles a bit at the end. If we have a look at the publication dates, there's gaps between the second and third issues, and the fifth and sixth. These gaps coincide with shifts in the art team, and I get the sense that this was a terribly delayed book, perhaps owing to the fact that it was a single creator doing much of the work. I wonder what the series would have looked like if there hadn't been the pressure to conform to the monthly schedule.
Steelgrip's final mission involves saving the planet from a very nebulous threat from the magnetic field. And then he has to stop a nuclear meltdown that results from the magnetic field shenanigans. All this after finding out that "Mr. Pilgrim," who created the APPT was actually...someone else in disguise all along. I don't want to ruin it for you.
All in all, Steelgrip Starkey was a pretty good series, and not nearly as porny as the title suggests! Open-minded and forward-thinking, rare for a comic of this era, and it definitely has an original premise. It unfortunately falls prey to the problem of art on a schedule, one that the comics industry really has to have a good hard look at one of these days. It always irked me that Marvel would never wait for Frank Quitely's New X-Men, and substituted fill-in artists for him (especially because the execrable Ethan Van Sciver was one of them). Imagine what that series would have looked like if the schedule had even been bi-monthly. You can't rush good art.
Well, maybe sometimes.
"Well! That lit up my ganglia!"
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