Random Back Issues #88 - Dynamo 5 #23

That's what you said when you wouldn't stop at McDonald's last week.

Last time we looked at an issue of Dynamo 5, most of the team had packed up and gone home, leaving a hodgepodge of Faeber's other characters to fill the gap. The whole team is back now, but things aren't going much better.

Maddie was investigating the disappearance of a friend's husband, only to find he and five other scientists put their brains on an android body and started calling themselves Brain Trust. The ensuing fight wasn't going well, so team shapeshifter Myriad injected himself with an extra dose of a drug he'd been taking to boost his speed, strength and reflexes. Unfortunately, this version of super-soldier serum turned him into a version of Whiptail, a Lizard-type foe the team fought before.

Even worse, people all over town who were using the drug are also turning into Whiptails. Lizard-man epidemic! Also, no help from the authorities. In fact, Maddie orders half the team, Visionary and Slingshot, to go help the authorities. 

While Scrap and Scatterbrain try to contain their teammate, Maddie makes a pitch to Brain Trust. They use their knowhow to devise an antidote and it'll help protect the loved ones some of them probably have in Tower City. Considering last issue's attempt to get these guys to surrender by threatening their original bodies didn't work, this seems like a faulty plan. So Maddie also agrees to let them just go, as long as they get out of Tower City. Scrap and Scatterbrain object, and Maddie does what she usually does when someone disagrees - tells them to shut up and does what she pleases. She's Asshole Batman, basically, if he was a middle-aged secret agent/reporter.

Fortunately, Brain Trust are not smart enough to recognize they could just leave now, and Maddie and the team are too occupied to stop them. Antidote created, antidote applied, everyone's back to normal. Brain Trust leaves, the husband Maddie was looking for asking her to tell his wife he loved her. Maddie tells him to just leave. Curious how she's going to explain all this to her friend. They try going up the ladder to the source of the drug, but he was working with the head of the covert agency Maddie used to work for, and got tipped off. Bad guys getting away all over the place.

Leaving time for an uncomfortable conversation between Myriad and the others about why he took the drugs. Basically, he felt he had the lame powers and needed a way to keep up. Slingshot points out the last time they found out Myriad was keeping a secret, he said it was because he wasn't used to having people to confide in. Well, yeah, that sort of ingrained behavior doesn't just vanish overnight. Especially since, as I recall, the team didn't take finding out Myriad's momma was also an alien all that well.

In "subplots which are about to become plot," Captain Dynamo's other daughter (via one of his arch-foes), Synergy, has brought a special gun she stole from that covert agency to a guy she's staying with. The guy turns out to be Maddie's estranged son.

Everyone in this comic is a lousy parent. It's like reading X-Men!

{4th longbox, 42nd comic. Dynamo 5 #23, by Jay Faerber (writer), Matteo Scalera and Mahmud A. Asrar (artists), Ron Riley (colorist), Charles Pritchett (letterer)}