The nineties continue!
Creative Staff:
Story: Chris Warner
Art: Patrick Olliffe, Tom Nguyen
What They Say:
Wyvern Stormblüd is on a murderous rampage, and Barb Wire is the focus of the drunken disaster’s fury. Barb’s lost the one weapon capable of dropping the besotted behemoth, and if it can’t be found among the wreckage of a shuttered steel mill, she’ll be laid off for good!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The opening arc of Barb Wire comes to a close with this installment and I continue to get a very 90’s feeling from a lot of it. And in some ways I really can’t decided yet if it’s a good or bad thing because the book hasn’t really defined itself much. There’s a kind of rough and tumble element to it that I like with the whole Steel Harbor setting yet I also can’t help but to think that this could have been a more powerful book because of the setting, the economic and political aspects it could explore and the social as well. But here we are, four issues in, and we’re finally done dealing with Stormblud. And what’s really changed from then to now? Not a heck of a lot.
The bulk of the issue is mostly just a series of chase sequences because Stormblud cannot be contained. In a container. Barb and the gang did come up with a pretty good way to try and hold him down amid all that was going on, but it wasn’t good enough and all it did was serve to make him angrier. He’s more interesting drunk though and all of that is wearing off so his mannerisms are mild at this stage and he comes across as more buffoonish than anything else. There is some silly material with the camera crew as Barb catches up to them to get what she needs to defeat him, but they’ve otherwise been largely ineffective. I don’t expect much from the camera crew of course but there was a sense that some were more helpful partners in her bounty work. Perhaps that makes more sense when not dealing with powered people like Stormblud.
Most frustrating is the fallout from it. While Barb is feeling the pinch of business in a huge way, Stormblud is her ticket to getting out of some of the holes she’s in. But it’s all taken from her by Mace at the end as he uses it as a way to wipe her slate clean between them, thereby returning her status to what it was before in the area. His acquisition of Stormblud does let him get the money and he uses it to exercise some new control over Barb by becoming her landlord and talking about raising the rent. Suffice to say that there is potential for some fun there between the two as a relationship goes, but I can’t help but feel that this is all just out of place, uninteresting and somewhat out of character from what we know of him so far. It does put Barb in a worse position, but her actual status is still the same financially and in regards to who owns the property.
In Summary:
Barb Wire has the potential for it to be so much more than it is and all I can see is a series that would have been written twenty years ago and wouldn’t have been any different. There’s a charm to that to be sure yet the series is one that really feels like it should have been given a much more creative facelift and approach. I’ve enjoyed aspects of the various Comics Greatest World characters coming back to life, but all of them seem to really lack anything in terms of a serious vision in order to take it to the next level as opposed to a mild upgrade at best – and a retread at worse. I like Barb Wire because there are a lot of things you can do with the character and the location. I doubt it’ll exercise it in this incarnation though.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: October 7th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
