Strongarm #1

Steve Horton & David Ahn

This is an advance review for Strongarm #1 from Image Comics, which hits comic stores in late February.

Strongarm is obviously a heavily manga-influenced title about twin brothers and the different paths they've taken in life. One brother works with a resistance movement while the other is a delivery boy who's going nowhere. This story takes place in a future where flying cars are the norm and all of the typical manga conventions are in place to make an already bland story that much more uninteresting. The book immediately opens with an action sequence where our loser brother is battling a hulking man with cybernetic arms. When the underdog gets lucky and kills his assailant, the arms begin to move and graft onto him, and unfortunately, he's unable to control the power he now wields. It seems that his position in life has now been inadvertently altered, for better or worse. If there was something, anything, to like about this issue, I could maybe nudge it into a category of "has potential," but as is, the characters are bland, the situations and look are generic, and the action isn't exactly engrossing by any means. It's just kind of there, trying to catch the attention of an audience that's already seen too many stories exactly like this one. You never know, this could develop into something decent, but an issue in, it's completely and utterly underwhelming. D-