REAL HEROES #3

Written and drawn by Bryan Hitch
Published by Image Comics

So must have the cast are plummeting to their death’s, having fallen out of the Olympians’ flying HQ, the Pantheon, along with Brute, who is basically the Hulk. Thankfully, their super-powers starts kicking in. Jennifer suddenly shrinks to tiny size and lands on a pigeon which flies away. Danny injects himself with The Patriot’s “boosters” and it gives him enough endurance to survive the falls. He lands on the street and heads to the nearest bar and starts drinking whiskey. For Leo, it appears as if time slows down, but it’s just his senses adapting to his super-speed. When he lands he just starts running away as fast as he could, soon ending up across the country in California. Chris lands with The Brute, who keeps attacking him. But after a building collapses on them both, Chris heads to what he thinks is his mother’s apartment, but when gets there he finds this universe’s version of his father, who is still alive her, and Chris just passes out.

Meanwhile Jeremy and Nichola are still on The Pantheon with Brainchild, who has figured out that they are not the “real” Olympians. He makes a deal with them, that if they film another video with him, declaring their partnership to the world, he’ll send them and their friends back home, which they agree to. But as they try to contact Leo and get him to run back to New York, thousands of devastators (those giant flying robot thingies, one of which attacked the cast in the first issue) show up in California and start blasting the fault line, preparing to create a massive earthquake.

So the drama really picked up in this issue, and things got even more dangerous for the cast. Smitty, whom Brainchild calls Smith, is nowhere to be seen in this issue, he just split. Brainchild is looking for him, but this would appear to confirm my suspicions about him from the previous issue, that he’s not as innocent as he appears. There’s also the matter that he didn’t tell all of the cast that the costumes they wear would give them actual super powers. Why not? Yet it’s also hard to accept that Brainchild is being so darn reasonable. He is supposed to be a villain. So what’s up with that. I’d argue that there’s probably a bit of decompression going on with this series, 3 issues in and they’re still not really “The Olympians” yet, it’s hard for me to hold that against Hitch, as it’s pretty standard for modern comics. As I said before, this feels like a Mark Millar-written book. But those who buy this book primarily for Hitch’s artwork certainly won’t be disappointed here, as each page looks great. Still a solid book.