Every once in a while we come across a comic that's so well-meaning and so earnest that we almost feel bad for making fun of it here at Stupid Comics.
Almost.
It is 1987, you're in the white hot blast radius of the black and white comics explosion, and you find yourself looking at this classy Ken Steacy cover. Should you pick this up? It's aobut some kind of robot girl and some guy with a handgun, and it has "Cyber" in the title? And it's a number one so obviously it's going to appreciate in value like all number one comics do? Sure, grab it!
Right away we know we're in for something special when we're told the artist is bringing her "unique, personalised version of the Magna style" to this production. I think they meant to say "manga", but who knows?
Well, our first impression is that somebody had a lot of back issues of "ROM: Spaceknight" lying around and figured "what the hell," that's OUR first impression.
In all of her ten years of life living out on the desert riding horses and maintaining gigantic heads of hair, our heroine Chemaine Ortega had never seen a shooting star. This begs the question, exactly what is Chemaine Ortega's problem? Spend any time at all outside in the desert at night, merely look up at random every once in awhile, and you'll see a shooting star, guaranteed.
Anyway, she's seen one now! Cross that off your bucket list, Chemaine!
Sporting two giant air conditioning vents, our new friend... is this Cybercom or is Cybercom something they're going to find the secret of, we don't know... anyway, our new lady robot friend might have appreciated the beauty of this land, this desert with its carpet of shrubs and blades of grass, which let's be honest, isn't much of a desert, she might have appreciated it but she's too tired. Good night.
Dad didn't have any time for shooting stars when he was a kid growing up in Spanish Harlem, where when you're a Jet you're a Jet for life and the singing and dancing go on all night every night, that's a West Side Story reference, look it up kids.
Though it is weird how a kid in the ghetto of New York City can see entire meteor showers through the pollution and lights of one of the world's largest cities, yet a girl out in the desert hasn't seen any. I'm really hung up on this meteor discrepancy is what I'm saying.
Sometimes the ghosts of your memories are so dark and threatening that they use a different font entirely!
Uh oh, the ghosts of his memories have just kicked the door in!
You know, the boss could have phoned or written a letter. Who's gonna pay for that door?
The familiar desert has become a cold hostile place, and the familiar skeletal structure of human beings has become... I guess you'd call this "magna style"
Here in the desert of shrubs, grass, and burbling streams, we ask. what's the big deal about deserts? They seem like perfectly nice places.
Our space robot finds she is no longer alone, and that means it's time for her hands to turn into electric razors and a swarm of bees to coat her in white paint.
Someday space cyborg robot lady manufacturers will invent a "black box" that can accurately record curiosity levels, but not today.
Meamwhile Dad is getting the beating of his life from these three goons who are after something so important that we, the readers of this comic, aren't allowed to know exactly what it is or why it would inspire three NYC goons to travel 2000 miles to the desert. I mean it must be really important! Too bad we'll never know.
On the other hand, you have to admire a comic book that realizes when you gotta track somebody down, get some dogs. That's what they're for.
I swear this girl's hair is growing by the minute. Soon she'll be nothing but hair, a giant Cousin It frightening dogs and space robots alike.
I guess New York City ran out of runaways and so the pimps had to start kidnapping kids from remote New Mexico ranches? The Great Runaway Famine of 1987, is that what happened?
When there's a Doberman involved, that's what makes it a Class Three engagement.
Ill trained in combat, the dog handlers are... okay, these are regular human people fighting a flying metal space robot. Exactly what martial arts combat training would help them in this situation? Why, the flying metal space robot could just shove them like a sixth grade locker room bully!
Throwing stars, lasers, Japanese toy stores... all the ingredients for the perfect childhood.
Here our "wardroid" friend displays the kind of friendliness and compassion we don't typically see in flying space war cyborgs.
Looks like our new wardroid friend is trying out some action movie catch phrases, so look out bad guys!
And hey our goons are about to execute Ramon with their new non-marking death guns that apparently satisfy some sort of previously unaddressed need in the gangster murder community, the need to leave a tidy corpse. As to why Ramon is marked for death, well, who knows. I don't know if anybody knows.
I actually kinda like the artwork in this comic - it's light and sketchy with well-spotted blacks- but this panel here where the robot is far away shooting towards the gangster and it looks like the robot is actually two feet tall dangling from a string like a pinata, that's when this isn't working for me.
Guys! Don't try and jump female robots! You might get the positive and negative terminals mixed up and start a battery fire!
The sheer weight of that kid's hair is beginning to exert gravitational force on the mass in its vicinity.
I am called TX-19, I learned your Earth language by listening to your radio programs, and this is my robot bra
Our planet has a stable matriarchal society. And a stable six-moon orbital society, as well. Which means, think about it, six Sailor Moons.
We didn't have any wars and we got to ride around on beautiful horse-deer things and we all had luxurious masses of thick black hair, and it was pretty much perfect. Oh yeah we also had high-tech space fighter planes just because they look cool and futuristic sitting out on the runway.
And then the Must'Ache came in their spiky spacecraft to make us pay the unpreparedness price as we faced... The Drinkers Of Fear! Which would be Lee Ving, and the rest of his bandmates in the 1980s punk band "Fear"- you might have seen them on Saturday Night Live! And if you thought they wrecked that NBC television studio, just wait until you see what they do to this planet!
Which you will never see, as this was the only issue of "Cybercom." I know, I know... they're all like this, all these ambitious black and white boom comics, all thinking they were going to be able to publish their giant sprawling saga of heroes and adventure across dozens or hundreds of issues of their very own comic book, never stopping to say to themselves, "hey, why not let the first issue be a stand-alone story? Why not give the readers a beginning, a middle, and an end and kind of ease them into our comic book world without saddling them obligation of a keeping up with continued story? No? You don't wanna do that? Okay then. See you in the 25 cent bins."
So, to wrap up; nice inks, big hair, kinda weak in the character motivations, weirdly lush desert, awkward action scenes, fake-out continued story, "magna style," the end. Now drink some fear!
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