Open Mike Night: Jackpot #1 and C-3PO #1

Jackpot #1

​Written by: Ray Fawkes
Art by: Marco Failla
Colored by:  Stafani Rennee
Lettered by: Comicraft’s Jimmy Bentacourt
Cover by: Brain Stelfreeze

Published by: Aftershock
Cover Price: $1.99

Mike Maillaro:  I have been reading a lot of Aftershock lately.  They are a new company, putting out a great variety of books by top shelf creators.  And the first issues are usually only two bucks, which is a great selling point for me.  For two bucks, I will pretty much try any comics.  Jackpot in particular a log line, “The world’s greatest con artists on the eve of the greatest scam in human history - ripping off the gods themselves.”  I was sort of expecting Leverage meets Percy Jackson.

The first issue introduces us to a team of thieves running a con to rob a crime boss of several million dollars of counterfeit bearer bonds and diamonds.  The mission goes sideways when a bomb appears out of nowhere and almost kills one of the team.  They manage to escape with the money, but they are being watched by a mysterious organization who wants to recruit one of them team to assist them in something called “The Trial Majestic.”

I did think this issue felt very rushed, and the end result was real clunky dialogue.  It was as if they were trying to give us too much exposition and characterization at once, but the big problem was that it never seemed to focus on the most important or interesting things.  We don’t get to know the characters all that well, and even the plan is never spelled out all that clearly.  I can excuse clunky dialogue when it is giving the reader something they need or will at least enjoy, but often here is just felt messy and pointless.

Mike Weaver: I felt that we got way too much of the Disposable Crime Lord Du Jour, and not enough about the team.  It seemed like he was going to be a font for exposition a few times, but he got interrupted by the other characters.  It also seemed like the plan involved like three or four levels of false flag which comes across as needlessly complex, especially when you don’t have a lot of knowledge about who’s being scammed and why.

I wanted to like this comic, and on some levels, I did.  Unfortunately, it never totally came together.

Maillaro: Yeah, that describes my feelings real well.  I wanted to like this comic a lot, but at the end, the only thing I really loved about this comic was the dramatic style of the lettering when they introduced the characters. I know that sounds like I am making a joke, but I mean it, that 3-D lettering was not something you normally see in a comic, and it was at least something new and fresh here.

For my money, I think it would have been better to have this “heist” only take up half the comic and use the rest for characterization and building up to what comes next. From the tag line, I am expecting something supernatural, but there weren’t any real hints of that here.  I think any reader who might have read this expecting a straight-up heist is going to feel like they got bait and switched by the time of the next issue.  Your first issue should spell out your premise far better than this one did.

Weaver: I liked the 3D titles too, and was afraid it would come off as sarcastic, so I’m glad you beat me to that punch.  They also were the part that made it most feel like Leverage, which is what I went into this expecting.  Name, brief vague job title.

Sometimes a cold open works, but not here.  I agree with you that the heist should take up only half the comic, but I think it should be the second half, with at least a little fly on the wall stuff about their plan.  Because the way it got executed made it clear that it didn’t work like about half of them planned, and I’d like to know what they DID plan.

There’s the bomb, that’s kind of supernatural, including a little side conversation discussing that it was basically impossible.  Other than that, the only thing that seemed magical was how they managed to get the whole team on this megayacht in the positions they were in when the cold open happened.

Maillaro: Oddly enough, I was watching the pilot for Leverage just a few weeks ago, and like you said, they introduced the characters basically the same way “Name, job.” BUT, they also added a quick flashback for each character giving some context.  And that was really what this issue was missing.  I never felt like I had any connection to the characters or to their plot.  Are they in it for money, fame, something else?  

I always say that the hard books to review are the mediocre ones.  Good books I know what to say. Bad books, I know what to say, and sometimes take a perverse glee in saying it.   For mediocre books, I just kind of feel blah.  How many ways can we say, “not the worst book ever, but I am not sure this first issue was good enough to help it stand out in a crowded comic market?”

Scores?

Weaver: It’s hard to score this book, because I kind of want to score the book I wanted it to be, which there were elements of but not enough, and I kind of want to score the parts of it that didn’t work, and like you said, with a mediocre book, it’s hard to score because you feel a score in the middle indicates that it was just fully average, and it wasn’t.  That’s my massive run on sentence for the day.

That said, I’ll go with 3 for story, 4 for art, if only for the lettering.

Maillaro: I think those are real fair scores.  But I will probably say 3.5 for the art. Lettering can’t carry a book when it’s only used sparingly.  I do think the series has potential, and I would probably want to revisit in the future to see if it hits that potential, but for now, it’s just around average.  Great tagline, great design, not a lot else to hang your hat on.  

C-3PO  #1

Written by: James Robinson
Art by: Tony Harris
Lettered by: VC’s Joe Caramagna
Cover by: Tony Harris

Published by: Marvel
Cover Price: $4.99

Weaver: This story features C3PO on a mission to rescue Admiral Ackbar from the First Order via kidnapping a First Order droid and taking him back to the rebel base to be searched for information.  It becomes sort of a Dirty Dozen type story, with all of the six original members of the droid group dying so that C3PO can get the information to the rebels.  Even the droid that was First Order ends up helping in his mission.

This sort of story is pretty cliche, with the enemies being forced to work together to survive and heroic sacrifice happening every few pages, but there were a lot of interesting new twists to it.  The biggest one was about how droid memories are purged when they transfer owners, and even periodically when they have the same owner, yet there’s still some artifacts in there kicking around that act like dreams to the droids.  And with that kind of rampant deletion and reuse, who’s to say that the First Order droid wasn’t a rebel droid at some point?

Maillaro: You know, when I saw they were making a comic about how C-3PO ended up with a red arm in The Force Awakens, I was expecting something kind of light.  Even with James Robinson and Tony Harris reunited on this book, it was not at all what I was expecting.  But, honestly that turned out to be a very good thing.  

You don’t really give a lot of thought to droids in Star Wars, but they refer to their owners as “Master” and they have a lot of personality for robots. This special ends up getting into some deep philosophical waters.  At what point does programing become personality.  

I also liked seeing how the other droids look at C-3PO.  C-3PO can be a bit of an annoying character, but he’s been through a lot and seen it all.  He has had memory wipes of a lot of it, but there are hints those aren’t as thorough as humans might believe.  The First Order droid who decides to sacrifice himself for C3PO to finish his mission was a real powerful image, especially when C3PO decides to honor him by using his arm for a while (3PO had lost his earlier to acid rain).  

Weaver: I also liked that despite the fact that all these characters were going to die during the mission, Robinson gave them personality and history.  Too often, you can accurately predict who’s not living through it by who doesn’t get backstory.  As they say, not having a name is the leading cause of death in fiction.

I was a little confused about the layout of the planet and the timeline of the story since there’s a lot of things pointing to this job needing to be done immediately, but they also go through so many different types of landforms that it feels like it should be days, or else this world is like Battleworld or something. That’s a minor quibble, though.

Maillaro: Maybe it was death by Storm Trooper firing squad.  Their aim is so lousy that they might have been trying to kill Ackbar for weeks.

Yeah, I did think the timeline was kind of odd here, but I was actually kind of happy to see a Star Wars planet that had a variety of environments.  Pretty much it’s always ice planet, forest planet, desert planet, molten volcano planet.  This planet was a total kill-scape, but at least you got to see a variety of things as you went.  It almost felt like a video game at times.

James Robinson has been doing some terrific work for Marvel over the last few years, and it was great to see him working with Tony Harris again.  It really made me mourn for the fact we still haven’t seen any kind of Starman in New-52 (actually I have no idea if that is true, I stopped reading the Earth-2 books a while ago now).  It could be cool to see them doing a Starman-like series either set in the Star Wars or mainstream Marvel universe.

Weaver: In a way, this has elements of Starman, with some importance placed on half-remembered things of the past, and I could see a series developing along those lines with Star Wars, but I don’t know how much they want to expose the Star Wars universe to deep comic storytelling.  

I didn’t think about that with Star Wars planets, but it amuses me now that I think of it.  The capital is even a planet that is totally covered with city.  City planet.

C3PO’s voice seems really spot on to me here, as well.  With a beloved well known character, that’s not always an easy task.  And I liked that the droids called each other variant names occasionally, which I had always assumed that the droids address each other as letters and numbers, not nicknames like “Threepio.” An astonishing amount of depth to the droid side of the Star Wars universe here that I didn’t even stop to think about, but now wonder why I never thought about it.

Maillaro: Yeah, Marvel has been doing a great job with their Star Wars comics for exactly that reason.  They seem very concerned with giving a much wider perspective of what it means to live in the Star Wars universe.  I had seen some books and comics in the past that did SOME of that for Star Wars, but under the Disney regime, it seems to be a lot more important.  Though I guess that is not quite fair, we did get a lot of that in Clone Wars, which was before Disney took over.

I thought the writing was completely on point.  My biggest problem with Harris’s art has always been action sequences.  They tend to look jumbled and chaotic. Which actually makes sense, BUT, it makes it hard to follow what’s going on.  A few times, I had to wait for a character to respond to what we had just seen to figure out what had happened.  I remember that happening in Starman a bunch of times too.  He builds a amazing, detailed world, but sometimes it’s just too hard to follow, which is a problem for sequential art.   So I will say 5 for the writing, and a 3.5 for the art.

Weaver: I had the same criticisms for the art, but I did like the panel layouts and the character designs.  Just the chaos of battle was hard to follow.

A five in writing is definitely the right choice, but I’m bumping art up to a 4.

Maillaro:  A few years back, my colleague over here got me into read Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files.  I think we’ve both basically drifted away from keeping up with the books themselves, but I have been enjoying Dynamite’s comic series tie-ins.  So, I’m thinking for next week, we give the newest mini-series a shot. It’s called Wild Card...which might be the most generic name for a book ever.

Weaver: Well, it fits with his idea of the two word title with both words having the same number of letters.  I’m definitely down for that.

Maillaro: Just a quick programming note, for various behind the scenes reasons, we will be changing up the formatting of Open Mike Night moving forward. We’ll probably still do two books a week, but spread over two columns.  

Any suggestions on a classic book you’d like to hit up next week?

Weaver: Hellstrom?  He had a good early 90’s series.

Maillaro: Sounds perfect!  

Final Scores