Cyberforce: Rebirth Volume 1, by Marc Silvestri and crew
2013
I am not a troll, I read comics because I love comics. But buying Cyberforce: Rebirth is the closest I've come to trolling with a comic since I read Captain America Heroes Reborn 1 in 1995. I did not buy this with any expectation that I might like it.
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| This is pretty cool coloring on here, much better than Image's 90s house colors |
I bought it in December, and put off reading it for this reason. So why would I even buy it? I loved Silvestri's work in the late 80s in Web of Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men. I bought a few issues of the original Cyberforce in the 90sbefore I realized none of it made any sense whatsoever. So I figured I'd see what Silvestri did with the concept in 21st century. Plus, it was ¥265. That's less than the cost of subway where I am.
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| If you like this, you'll like the book |
I didn't like this book. I didn't hate it either. It's not bad per se, it successfully does what it wants to do. It's a competent low class gritty sci fi action story. But the book also has some pretensions that it is about something, when it isn't about anything at all. It's comparable to an 80s action flick with 21st century sci fi buzzwords dropped in.
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| From Silvestri's introduction: "Our intellect has outpaced our ability to evolve," it seems this is a book of ideas |
The original Cyberforce were... I don't know, the stories were a word salad. They were mercenaries? Cyborgs who fought stuff? There was a Wolverine/Sabertooth guy called Ripclaw, and a sexy one called Cyblade, and some more I can't name. They're back!
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| Three of these four will be dead mere pages from now. What a crock of S#!* |
And then they are killed in the second issue, all except two. The plot is about a mega corporation called CDI, which is trying to control the end of humanity as we know it, so they can engineer a better type of human to live in the aftermath. But that's all talk.
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| What if Facebook, but evil? |
The plot is actually about CDI sending mercenaries to hunt down the cyber daughter of the head of CDI, who has run away to find her birth father, who is a retired CDI merc named Stryker. Stryker used to lead Cyberforce, I think. And the wife of the head of CDI, who had an affair with Stryker at one time, has sent out her own merc to track the daughter down. The daughter hooks up with the Cyberforce folks, which put all three sides at odds with each other as they look for Stryker. Stryker works in a toll booth, and wakes up in the morning from nightmares where he relives his merc days, screaming, "Nooooo!".
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| If you like this, you'll like the book |
It sounds complicated, but the book is mostly comprehensible after the first issue or two. Once I knew who the characters were, I followed the story without effort. It's a plot. It's not nearly as deep as the writers and artists on it might pretend it is, but it works.
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| This couple is peak frenemy |
The thing is, the book is unpleasant in a lot of ways. It's rooted in 80's and 90's Hollywood tropes. For one, everybody in the book seems to hate each other. Nobody is nice to people, especially not on their own side. Every other line is an insulting quip. It's grinding to read, and the opposite of what I enjoy about a book like X-Men, where the characters are family. It's miserable. I don't want to spend extended periods of time in a world where people barely tolerate their friends.
The book also wants to be badass, but it's a lot of posing. Characters swear, rip people apart, and it's just not enough to make it worth showing. A book like Berserk shows gore and genuine deviance, and it goes all the way. This book seems closer to a high school student's concept of badass than to actually being badass. That's fair, Cyberforce readers are not real bad boys (not to imply that I am either), but I find the concept of badass in this to be pretty goofy.
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| This scene was not in the book |
It's not for me. It's successful enough in what it does. The art by Khoi Pham is solid, and works well with the colors. Silvestri is credited with ideas, covers, and character designs... and his covers are good. He's a good artist, and was always one of my favorite Image boys graphically. He's leaned into the cheesecake over the years, but he does it well. He's developed a style which reminds me of Frazetta in its extreme drama.
The question remains of whether this needs to exist, since I would have thought very few people had nostalgia for the original Cyberforce (the creators of this book too, since they kill off most of those characters), and it turns out the whole thing was a Kickstarter.
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| Bearded men read comics |
That's icky. I don't like to see a millionaire creator use a crowdfunding platform to pre-sell their comic, but that's the free market. Silvestri has as much right as anyone to use a system meant to circumvent mainstream publishers to fund his mainstream publishing venture, and the people paid for it. Comics is a crazy industry.
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