When a mysterious ghost ship appears in Los Angeles harbor, Mister Terrific must investigate his strangest case yet! Supernatural horror quickly gives way to a nuclear nightmare as L.A.’s protector uncovers a terrorist plot to destroy the city. But while Mister Terrific fights for the City of Angels, a shocking new villain rises from the ashes of betrayal. Get ready to meet Digitus, the unstoppable monstrosity who can out-think Mister Terrific!
Eish, didn’t really enjoy this one all that much. Writer Eric Wallace packs what should be a much longer storyline into a short twenty odd pages, leaving us with a story filled with a spur of the moment saving a life, stopping a getaway car act of heroism, investigating a high-tech break-in and then an entire saving the city from a nuclear bomb planted onboard a mysteriously appeared ship and guarded by invisible Russian-trained terrorists.
One suspects that the big rush may very well be attributed to the fact that Mr. Wallace learned that his title was to be canceled the very next issue, but to be honest, packing all of this in one issue hurts its pacing – and impact – a lot.
Mister Terrific, Michael Holt, is actually a pretty likable hero, but the book’s insistence of using heavy (mostly bad/comic book) science actually detracts from it slightly, as you’re bogged down by first having to go find some online references to make any sense of what is actually happening. On top of that, the reliance on the almost magical T Spheres which appear to be able to do just about anything, is almost too much of an easy crutch to lean on, basically solving any problem at hand without any explanation as to how they are doing what they are doing whatsoever. (A little silly whe n you consider just how “scientific” the book tries to be.)
Gianluca Gugliotta handles the pencils, with Wayne Faucher on inks, while Mike Atiyeh lays down the color. To be honest, the art isn’t horrible and funnily enough, Gugliotta’s pencils really do have a sort of hip hop, black urban feel to it, which suits the Mr. Terrific environment perfectly given the LA setting. However, that said, I don’t know if it is because of the pencils, inks or coloring style (no wait, actually I’m pretty sure it’s the colors), but often the pages come across as being very busy, too busy if you know what I mean. This “frantic” look detracts from the good linework and to be honest, doesn’t leave you with an entirely awesome visual experience at the end of it all.
In any event, Mister Terrific #7 certainly isn’t a bad book, but I can’t say that I truly enjoyed it, and am thus not entirely surprised that DC canned the series as quickly as what they did.
