A comiXologist recommends…
Revolution #1
Written by John Barber & Cullen Bunn
Art by Fico Ossio
IDW’s explosive Revolution event is all about action cartoons at war. If you ever sat around as a kid pitting your GI Joes against your Transformers and all your other toys, this event is just that! There are explosions, violence, and misunderstandings leading to even greater violence!
Revolution #1 opens right into the thick of things with IDW’s resident secret agent Action Man skydiving onto Mount Olympus. Action Man and his pilot partner Salmons find a cave of glowing purple crystal formations. Impaled on one of these formations is former GI-Joe and mercenary Big Ben. Big Ben uses his final moments to warn Action Man of some serious business coming down on everyone’s heads. Then Mount Olympus blows up, setting every faction on the planet on edge and poised for a fight.
Things pick up pretty fast and before you can say, “Roll out,” or “Yo Joe,” people are bursting into flames and Transformers are losing limbs. It gets pretty visceral and it is just fantastic. It would be at this point that I would insert clapping Emojis in between every syllable of “fantastic” if we were texting.
Revolution #1 is exactly what I like in an event opener. A page of exposition per faction is given and then everybody gets to work By the end of the issue there’s a really big problem and more fighting to come! It is also very encouraging to see in the first issue that this event isn’t as cumbersome as events can and have been. If you’re an avid reader then you know how big and unwieldy these events can be, but this creative team keeps everything moving, fresh, and at a manageable size.
John Barber is most known around this office for his work on Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye and Robots in Disguise. With Cullen Bunn of Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe the two create an action work that carries the right balance of fights and attention to character logic. As far as interior artists go, Fico Ossio is a fantastic storyteller. Fico’s character acting for all human and humanoid aliens is flawless and well-paced.
This creative team has put forth some hard choices to come for the Transformers and G.I. Joes. And who knows what became of Action Man up there on Mount Olympus? I sure don’t, but I can’t wait to find out.
Matthew Burbridge is a Digital Editor at ComiXology and he is super digging that new look of yours. It’s really working for you. <3.