Obsessively putting our comics in chronological order since 1985.
| 1993-12-01 06:06:40 |
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Death Metal #3-4
Issue(s): Death Metal #3, Death Metal #4
Cover Date: Mar-Apr 94
Title: "Death hunt" / "Death hunt"
Credits:
Simon Furman - Writer
John Royle - Penciler
Robin Riggs - Inker
Stuart Bartlett - Editor
Review/plot:
Death Metal has been located by Mys-Tech and they've sent their Psycho Warriors after him.
Death Metal defeats the first wave and goes to an inhospitable planet, looking for peace. But the next wave of Psycho Warriors catch up to him. This planet happens to be the one where the female character we saw last issue was waiting for death. Her name is Spirit, and it turns out she wasn't waiting for death, she was waiting for (cue the devil horn gesture) Death Metal.
Meanwhile, another entity we saw previously, Abyss, spawns a child called Soul Slug.
I have no idea where any of this is going. Nothing in the first two issues prepared me for this, and i am hanging on for dear life. It seems to be a tendency of all Marvel UK writers to just throw hordes of characters with goofy and/or on-the-nose names at us and expect us to just stay engaged with it. The stories often have the feel of a child playing with toys and improvising a story.
Child: Death Cool punches all the robots! And suddenly, he faces [looks around, grabs a toy lizard] LIZZARD!!!!
Simon Furman is capable of more sophisticated writing but a lot of his work at this time fits into this category.
Death Metal actually doesn't punch all the robots, but when he's captured he's saved by Spirit.
And then she tries to get him to kill her.
He tries to teleport away from her, but she attacks him. And then he faces [looks around, grabs a broken Cable action figure repainted in Iron Man's color scheme] BRASSNUCKLES!
The unifying factor in these three characters is that they all want to die.
While Brassknuckles and Spirit fight each other for the honor of being killed by Death Metal, Death Metal is caught in a spell cast by the Mys-Tech exec Rathcoole. Rathcoole tries to wipe Death Metal's mind...
...but he's interrupted by, uh, ok, i have no #@$!@ idea who these people are.
Oh, right. This is the rest of the Mys-Tech executive board. I forgot that they were turned into super-teens. They're mad that Rathcoole wasn't going to share Death Metal.
Death Metal plays their mistrust with a fun ruse.
The rest of Mys-Tech seemingly destroy Death Metal.
There's also some barely developed subplot about two factions on the planet fighting over an Excedrin mine, but unfortunately (for me) the mine is all used up. Mys-Tech are about as interested in that subplot as i am.
But Death Metal does care about the fate of those people (even though he hadn't heard of them three seconds earlier), and fighting for them gives him a reason to go on living.
Mys-Tech teleport away after Tyburn is injured, and Death Metal convinces Spirit and Brassknuckles to help the settlers against their local oppressors. The one side was going to detonate a planet-wide suicide bomb, but Death Metal grabs it and throws it randomly through a teleportation warp. It just so happens to land in Abyss' abyss.
And apparently this was Argon's dad's plan all along. What the--?
We don't even get to see Soul Slug?
Anyway, these guys, am i right?
Well, Spirit will actually appear again in a minor role in the Annihilation: Ronan series. She is apparently a sister to Zorr, the character from Nova's origin story who is allegedly Nebula's father. Her desire for death comes from her assumed relation to Thanos. This info all comes from the Annihilation: The Nova Corps Files Handbook:
None of this has actually played on in-story. I'm fairly certain Spirit neither speaks nor is spoken to in Annihilation: Ronan, and she's seemingly killed at the end of it. I do like what the Handbook team came up with for her, though.
As for Death Metal, don't forget he's got a child out there who is supposed to grow up to kill him. But thanks to Marvel time and a complete lack of interest, Death Metal is safe (in the sense that he'll never appear again).
Quality Rating: D
Historical Significance Rating: 1
Chronological Placement Considerations: See the Considerations for the previous two issues regarding the placement of this series vs. Death Metal vs. Genetix #1-2. I have this directly after the vs. Genetix series just to try to reduce the weirdness around the break, although i suppose Death Metal could have waited any length of time before returning to space and/or he could have been back in space for any length of time before Mys-Tech located him "again".
References: N/A
Crossover: N/A
Continuity Insert? N
My Reprint: N/A
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Comments
The art in this book is full of swipes. The death of Abysss, for example, is taken directly from the disintegration of the Super-Skrull in Alpha Flight 10.
Fnord, you're finally done with Marvel UK and the Mys-Tech Wizards. Congratulations!
"[Marvel UK writer] stories often have the feel of a child playing with toys and improvising a story."
I can't help wonder if this was, perhaps, an issue with adapting to the way the US comic industry works/worked. When Marvel UK was publishing solely for the UK market, most of their original material was licensed, rather than Marvel Owned (Star Wars, Doctor Who, Transformers, Thundercats, and Ghostbusters all being more successful than any Marvel Universe title), individual issues had shorter stories (5/6 or 11 pages each week/fortnight, usually having to fit in with reprint material from the States), and were written full-script. Monthly 22-page stories written Marvel-style with fewer constraints aren't that far off being an entirely different medium. If this speculation is right, it's the opposite problem that Marvel Comics Presents had (which was that American writers simply couldn't write well for such an unfamiliar format). And was only made worse by the pressure to follow 90s Comic Book Tropes.
And in Furman's case, very little of his non-Transformers work stands up to the quality of his work on that series (particularly the UK series one he had found his feet). I can't help wondering if he struggled without recourse to his most familiar characters.
The unifying factor in these three characters is that they all want to die.
After reading fnord's summary of these issues I know *exactly* how they feel!
Michael: Thankyouthankyouthankyou for announcing the end of Marvel UK. In my opinion, none of these comics were worth reading. Hallelujah!
Awful as these issues most certainly are, they do establish a supporting cast—or at least sidekicks—and a villain or two of Death Metal’s own, giving him some story space apart from Death’s Head II and the Mys-Tech overplot. If there had been a short-lived Death Metal ongoing, it would have had a setup. That may have been all this series was intended to deliver.
