Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Diodes is a good word

NYC Mech: Let’s Electrify
Written by: Ivan Brandon & Miles Gunter
Drawn by: Andy MacDonald

A world full of robots and it’s not Cybertron. For some reason that seemed important to me at first. I didn’t really get this book when I started to read it. I started to project my own ideas onto it, which isn’t such a good thing to be doing. I just didn’t get the point but after the first story I realized there wasn’t a point to be gotten, just one to be missed.

This is a collection of stories that imagines New York repopulated by inorganic life. A bunch of hipster criminal robots to be more precise. Okay, not all of them are criminals but there are quite a few and a bunch of other unsavory characters to go on top of that. The stories are hit or miss depending on your mood. Heck even reflecting back onto this collection I’m still indecisive about whether I actually liked the stories or not. I did, and I didn’t.

The real treat here is Andy MacDonald’s artwork. It is simply stunning. It’s a bit disorienting at first but it has a precision and flow to it that is larger than life. It’s a fantastic mixture of stylized action and movement with utter minute details thrown in for good measure. It’s human robots so there is the fine lines of the metal meeting and the diodes and bolts with the movement and organic flow of people. It moves, it pops and it’s sort of off putting because it just shouldn’t work so well together yet it does.

If you’re looking for a bit of a break from exploding robots and people on the summer screens and are more in the mood for a few short stories – mostly crime/noir stories – where the players are robots. This is for you.

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