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Fighting American's final Awesome outing is a very different creature from the previous few stories. As far as I can tell there was supposed to be a Loeb/Liefeld series bridging Rules of the Game and Dogs of War called Cold War, but it never materialized. I wonder if it would have gone some of the distance toward explaining the changes. I think the aborted Allies series was probably supposed to have come out around this time as well.
The biggest change is that S.P.I.C.E. is not only absent from the comic, but isn't mentioned even once in this first third of the story. In fact, things have taken a turn for the darker, and I wouldn't have been surprised to find this comic amongst early Image titles by the same people. Stephen Platt's artwork is insane. His sense of the scale of masculine bodies is not something I understand, though there is something vaguely homoerotic about the consistent hyper-masculinity across his works. FA, and all of the male characters in this comic, are buff beyond buff. Like, to the point that I don't think a human body could actually sustain the amount of muscle that appears to be packed onto these bodies. Jim Starlin's words are, as would be expected, at a level above the usual hyper-violent Image-esque work, though he seems to be channeling Frank Miller a lot of the time here. Starlin also illustrates an issue of Supreme: The Return for Awesome, so perhaps he was one of the big-name talents Liefeld was courting before financial disaster struck.
While Platt's art is good, and I generally enjoy his work for what it is, this series, thus far, isn't nearly as good as the previous two. I think Loeb had a nice handle on how FA would react to his new circumstances, and much as I disliked her, S.P.I.C.E. brought some much-needed levity to the books. Without her, Fighting American has the potential, as I think we'll see in the next couple of issues, to basically become an early-Supreme styled Captain America, simply violent for violence's sake.
More to follow.
Further Reading and Related Posts
I've totally run out of related things to this series. If you want to read some more interesting stuff, how about my various thoughts on the Dollar Bin, one of my favourite parts of comic collecting.
Or how about a few posts on a very weird, very violent Canadian science fiction comic called Futility.
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