10 Thoughts On... Irredeemable Vol. 1

Hey X-Maniacs, X here with a 10 Thoughts post. I'm pretty busy with the impending end of the school year coming up, so I figured now would be as good a time as any to post this, since I had actually finished typing it up a week ago. Tomorrow I should have a bunch of new comic reviews up, but today, we're going the retro/trade route. That's it from me, here's a look at the first Irredeemable trade.

Irredeemable Vol. 1. Collecting Irredeemable #1-4... Just four comics?!

Synopsis: What if Superman got sick and tired of saving the necks of those idiots in Metropolis and started to listen to those people who kept calling him a menace? That's the question Mark Waid's Irredeemable asks. The Plutonian basically has all of the powers of Superman(we're talking freeze breath, super strength, heat vision, the works), but has turned his back on society, utterly annihilating his former home city, and roaming around the Earth, killing his former super-hero teammates and basically abusing the frightened populace of the planet. The few remaining heroes have banded together, but really, what can they do against a foe who knows them, their families, their weaknesses and is more than willing to use that knowledge against them?

-Okay, I'm just going to come right out and say it... For this to be a REAL trade, shouldn't there be at least six issues collected here?! I mean the cover price is reasonable($9.99) and I got it at Amazon way cheaper than that, but still...

-Another thing, Grant Morrison writes the afterword for this trade, and it was some great stuff! He actually makes two very interesting points... Number one, he DOES know how insane his writing is seen by many, calling himself, “the madcap purveyor of free-form gibberish...” I LOVED that line! I may use it on myself! The second thing he mentioned was that it's the very vocal older comic book readership who were clamoring for the return to the days of Ollie(Queen), Barry(Allen), and Hal(Jordan). Morrison, unlike Chairman Johns or Dan Didio IS a progressive writer, whether you like him or not, possibly the only one DC has on-board these days... That's sad...

-The Plutonian killing his sidekick? Terrible! The remaining heroes raising the dead kid temporarily to talk to him? Creepy!

-Sadly, I really didn't pick up on a lot of the names of the super-heroes in this book... There's Qubit(the guy who can talk to machines), but the names of the rest escape me... Whatever happened to the days where everybody had ultra easy names to remember?!

-The Plutonian's girlfriend's reaction to the fact that he was working by her side in disguise at their job(ala Clark Kent and Lois Lane) was FANTASTIC! And way more realistic than most characters who are duped by heroes in that manner.D'OH!!!

-I also loved the way the Plutonian's enemies decided to hide at the base of the dead hero, Inferno. And THEN see the Plutonian strolling around the base, ignoring them completely!

-How quickly the villains tried to betray Plutonian was both hilarious and sad... I mean the guy was still talking and they were trying to stab him in the back! Villains...He was still talking!

-The US delegate at the UN bashing the Plutonian, a super-human with KNOWN super-hearing? Not that smart...Yeah, not that smart.

-The delegate from Singapore lying to the Plutonian about how grateful the people of his country were? Nice try, but he can hear heartbeats!

-I also LOVED the way the Plutonian utterly destroyed Singapore, and the sick choice he forced Qubit to make... It went such a long way in showing how frustrated the Plutonian was with the way people blamed him for not being able to save EVERYBODY, even though he was able to save ALMOST everybody. Awesome look into his warped mind.This was, by far, one of the best scenes I've read from any comic in some time.

Score: 9 out of 10. If this trade would have been a full-sized, 6 issue trade, I'd have probably gone with a 9 1/2 for the score. I really enjoyed this trade, and the story here, but there were two little things that bugged me... The first is the fact that the characters who weren't the Plutonian(and to a lesser extent, Qubit) really didn't leave enough of an impact on me for me to really get to know them. The second is that with a lead character who is an absolute, genocidal monster, I'm not sure what the shelf-life of this series is, at least for me. I mean no matter how well Waid writes this series(and I REALLY like Waid and his writing), I can't shake the feeling that after like 15-20 issues of the Plutonian acting like an animal, the initial luster of this series is going to wear away... I mean he's a real bastard! It'll be interesting to read a series where I'm openly rooting AGAINST the lead character!