Written by Joe Casey
Drawn by Simon Gane
Published by Image Comics
PREVIOUSLY: DUTCH #0
Alright, this is a bit of a late review, this came out last Wednesday, but here we go.
Dutch made it to Washington D.C. to break into the Pentagon. He faces some heavy machinery to get to the secret sub-levels and proves that even without weapons he’s a formidable opponent. He’s then greeted by a former teammate, Erika Richmond, who used to be the superhero known as Infiniti.
It’s interesting, I saw her in a few flashback panels in the previous issue where she was unnamed, I thought I recognized her as a different Rob Liefeld superhero, even though I knew he couldn’t legally use any Liefeld characters (hence, the retconning of his membership in Youngblood to a new team called Blood Squad 7, and his previous employment with the cyborg terrorist Giger instead being for a reptilian terrorist called Gerig), but now I remember Infinit as a part of a backstory created and written by Eric Stephenson that ran through several Extreme Studious comics. Stephenson is the Publisher of Image Comics now and is editing this series.
Erika takes Dutch down to the top secret “War Room” and he tells her about the attacks at his home and his suspicions about Gerig and Cybertech being active again. Erika is strangely dismissive of this idea, acting like Cybertech is no threat anymore and he’s just paranoid. Dutch leaves to go to a local hotel and as he tries to sleep that night, he finds himself attacked by a bunch of flying drones, leading to another battle and ending in a dramatic cliffhanger.
Simon Gane does a decent job here, taking over the art chores from Nathon Fox. But as for the story, well, it’s not bad, but it’s not really great either. It many ways it feels like a rehash of the zero issue, it’s mostly Dutch in long action scenes fighting robots while his internal monolog is told in captions as he thinks about the past and getting old. The issue ends with him no wiser than he was when it began. So I have to admit it’s a bit of a disappointment, but I’m still interested enough to see what happens next.
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