Creative Team:
Writer: Duane Swiercynski
Artist: Manuel Garcia
What They Say:
Your name is Angelo Mortalli. Your brother is trapped behind enemy lines and on the verge of – no. That’s not right. Your name is Raymond Garrison. You’ve retired from the dangers of the field, but a desperate plea from your oldest friend plunges you into a vicious firefight that – no. That’s not right, either. You are Bloodshot. You are the shade of gray that freedom requires. The perfect confluence of military necessity and cutting-edge technology. A walking WikiLeaks. A reservoir of dirty secrets that could set the world on fire. And you’ve just been captured! Collecting Bloodshot #1-4 (2012) by best-selling writer Duane Swierczynski and acclaimed artists Manuel Garcia & Arturo Lozzi, find out why this is the series that has IGN proclaiming “Valiant is quickly becoming the publisher to beat.”
The Review:
Some books intentionally try to be confusing right from the get go in order to throw you into the chaos that is the character himself. Bloodshot is one of those characters and it certainly makes sense from his perspective, but it makes it for a hard read. I wasn’t one that was all that enamored with the original Bloodshot book from the 90’s, but was definitely curious to see how the revamp would go in the present. With its design, it’s the kind of book where these first four issues in here really do feel like they set up the prologue to events more than anything else. But it does what you’d expect from such a book in just providing a lot of action, a lot of confusion and plenty of bloodshed. Written by Duane Swiercynski with artwork by Manuel Garcia and Arturo Lozzi, the series is one that just starts running and really doesn’t stop along the way to take a break.
The concept is one that has some merit in that we’re introduced, in a roundabout way, to the Rising Sun Project in which nanomachines are used to create an advanced soldier. But the nanomachines ended up evolvoing along the way into something more, which the researchers and the overall project leaders in Oreck decided to take advantage of. With the one man who was used given the codename of Bloodshot, they worked him over hundreds of times across several years where they would reprogram his mind through the nanomachines to give him a new background and a new family as well as something worth fighting for. That allowed them to send him on dangerous and deadly missions around the world, which are confusing in the scope with which we see them at times, and he causes a lot of damage and takes out many targets. Once they’re done with that mission, they wipe it from his mind and start again with the new personality so there’s no conflict with past missions.
The only way they can take out Bloodshot, which they had to do one three years prior to the start of this series, is through the use of a girl named Pulse. While they initially used her when she was younger, she has the ability to generate a massive EMP which can disrupt the nanomachines in his body, allowing a proper headshot to take him out. Though that only goes so far as we see that he was able to be re-used afterward, not that Pulse knew as she was thrown back into solitary until they needed her again. Which is now, as one of the original project managers, Keuritch, has set things up to trap Bloodshot, swiped all the memories in his mind to expose what Oreck has been doing to the world. The side effect of that plan is that Bloodshot himself realizes that he’s not any of the people thought he was and is just pissed off about it, wanting answers. When he hunts down one of the wives in his mind that lives close to where he is at the moment, he discovers that the woman was someone that Keuritch liked back in high school decades ago and is an older woman now with a late teenage son. It’s disconcerting to see how much of your life was a lie, but it sets him on the path to figuring out the truth.
Because of the nature of the book, so much of it is spent just being thrown from situation to situation and trying to catch up with Bloodshot himself that it doesn’t take much downtime to absorb it all. But there’s not a lot to absorb in a way because for a lot of it you’re hard pressed to be truly sure of what’s the truth, especially since there will obviously be layers to the Rising Sun project as well. Bloodshot’s a capable person as we know, but we get the added confusion of the nanomachines talking to him through images projected into his mind of the various people that he’s been programmed to believe he was involved with over the years and they do their best to help him survive, since it’s a pretty symbiotic relationship at this point. But that just adds one more layer of dialogue onto everything which makes the book busy, but also confusing since you can’t always be sure what’s going on.
In Summary:
The first volume of Bloodshot is one that leaves me feeling like there isn’t a lot to say, but there’s some interesting potential to it if it’s given the chance to just settle down some. I particularly liked the last panel as it creates an at least temporary group for him to work with as support at the least and grounds him with people that are actually real. There’s also room for some decent scope and scale to be worked with here when it comes to the project itself and what they can do, but right now it’s just all very top level kinds of things with the characters involved and the relationships between them and the project itself. The book mostly kept me feeling like it was keeping me at a distance rather than actively engaging me in it. It’s got a solid look to it overall and the dialogue works well, but the pacing and overall plotting has left me wary of the series.
Grade: B-
