A comiXologist recommends
DOC UNKNOWN Vol. 3: The War for Gate City

Doc Unknown is a series of great fun that saw it’s success surge through ComiXology Submit and Kickstarter.  Doc Unknown is a self-publishing dynamo with its 2 successful Kickstarters keeping the series going the last four years.  After seeing such success with the first installments, writer Fabian Rangel Jr (Extinct, Los Muertos) turned a four issue mini-series into a brilliant and fun epic of Golden-Age inspired heroics.  Add the heavy black shadows, strong jaws, and choice colors of Ryan Cody’s illustration and readers are left with a perspective more akin to the pulp noir books of the 1940s.  All that’s missing are colorful and interesting villains for the good doctor to smack around.

Just kidding!  There are tons of them!  There are many foolish villains for Unknown to break the teeth of!  Especially in this, the thrilling conclusion!!

We find our hero…having a deserved night out with his special lady-type friend, Helen.  It is New Year’s Eve, and there isn’t anything like a penthouse party with loved ones to soothe a hero’s sore knuckles.  But alas, Warren (that’s the Doc’s real name) sees an impossible green light shining off a rooftop blocks away.  Warren finds that he is the only person that can see this light, and must depart from the festivities without delay.  Not even a page later does Doc Unknown swing his foot into the jaw of the dreaded Sub-Creatures of Min Yao!  I don’t know what they are, but they’re scary and he swings his heel right into one.  Before that page is done, he punches another one’s teeth out in the proper pulp way!

A few wild fists and one big green teleportation light later and the Doc comes to in an abandoned apartment surrounded by three cloaked figures: The Conjurer, the Apparition, and another Doc Unknown?!  It is revealed to Warren mere moments after the reveal of his doppelganger, that there are “legions” of other Doc Unknowns living in hundreds of other timelines. But that particular detail isn’t important right now, because these three would-be kidnappers have to warn Warren of the coming war and the hand he is to play in it!

This whole series is fantastic!  The energy is actually non-stop, and it has every potential opportunity for a ridiculous thing to happen set up to happen one after the other with a new ridiculous thing!  And yes, that is what a story is supposed to do.  The difference here is the timing, and pacing is faster and in no way drags out.  No punches are in the least pulled, especially when the book wraps up.  Doc Unknown goes through 2 separate fistfights, gets projected through time and space twice, meets a wizard both when he’s old and young, and fights with a demon using shuriken and smoke bombs before expelling it back to the “Hidden Realm.” And that only puts you at maybe 20 pages into this volume, give or take a page or two.

Give this volume a look and definitely take a look at the whole series.  In the meantime, I’m going to work on a nickname for fans of this series.

I see nothing I don’t like about this book.  It is some of the most fun anybody can have reading a comic.  Fistfights, gunfights, possession, mystics, wizards, kung-fu, ambushes, warrior cults, inter-dimensional hero guilds, and some other outrageous sweetness grace the pages of just this volume.  I have to insist that if you’re interested, you should go back and read this series before this volume, but you don’t have to in the least.  Volume 3 stands on its own as one hell of a thrill ride.

-Matthew Burbridge

Read DOC UNKNOWN Vol. 3 on comiXology.com