Two comics last week, both Marvel. Two this week, one Marvel. I'm not sure why it seems as though all the non-Marvel comics I want wait until the end of the month to come out. I guess as long as they do come out, that's the important thing, and no certainty lately.
Reed and Sue are in a town where apparently every inhabitant is a Doombot with a holographic projection. So the duo have to figure what's going on, especially after the Doombots stop in the middle of attacking them to return to what they were doing before. They soon figure out that the Doombots all appear committed to maintain their disguises when around one particular old woman, and things go from there.
Like last issue, it's a bit of a mystery, Reed and Sue trying to figure out what' the key is behind how the Doombots act and how to deal with it. North opts to handle the issue from Sue's perspective, conveyed through a letter she's writing to She-Hulk about the whole thing. So there's a lot about how Sue sees Reed, and how she sees their relationship. It's fine for that part, although I can't decide if I buy Reed being as bad a liar as he's presented here.
North and Coello also use Reed's powers to somewhat different effect than I've seen before. Reed's able to disguise his face, and most disturbingly, at one point somehow stretches his eyeballs into the ends of his fingers to inspect something in tight quarters. It makes sense he would come up with varied ways to his elasticity, and I always enjoyed when he would do more than just stretch his arms and legs. You know, make himself into a bouncy ball, or turn one hand into a mallet. I can't help wondering why he didn't just stretch the eyes out of the sockets instead.
But the book is still talking around whatever it was that broke the team up and made everyone dislike the FF. Reed refers to pondering if he could have done something different, and Sue cuts him off with it not being his fault. I mean, given his track record, going back to insisting cosmic rays were no problem for his rocketship, there are pretty good odds it is his fault, Sue! And of course, the people they speak to don't directly say what happened, either. They just refer to Reed and Sue not wanting more trouble right now. At least that mystery is supposed to be resolved in two more issues, if solicitations can be believed.
Hey, if you ever wanted to see a Doombot taking a shower, this comic is your chance.
The team fights the robots. The fight itself is short and rather basic. A few panels of people posing and energy flying out of their hands, nothing real creative or anything like that. During the fight, The General takes a missile to the back. Taegukgi smashes that robot, but damages a load bearing girder and brings the entire building down. They do salvage a memory chip off one of the robots and learn it was built by a Korean conglomerate as part of a project named Kal Duo.
This throws us into another series of flashbacks to Taegukgi's childhood, this time when he makes friends with another kid in the neighborhood by stealing food. The kid's name was Kal Duo, and we see they formed a kid gang of sorts, which ends with Tae leaving his home when his mother figure insists he stop being a hooligan and go back to school.
I like that Kim shows in the flashbacks Kal was clearly the brains and Tae the muscle who doesn't think on his feet well or do well at planning contingencies. It adds some context to the robot fight earlier, when Tae just reacts and smashes the robot (who has already shot the General), but also brings the building down on his team. And at the end of the issue, he's lied to his team about Kal Duo meaning anything to him, and breaks into the conglomerate's office, where he finds his old friend waiting, minus some fingers and with a glowy eye, talking about secret and plans. He does have a snazzy outfit and cane, so that's cool.
I guess someone has to be the focal character in the mini-series, but given the entire cast has so few prior appearances, I wonder if it would have been better to spread the attention around a little more. The other team members have been lucky to get more than two lines of dialogue an issue so far, because everything's about Taegukgi. I did learn in this issue that Lady Bright is a widower, Gun-R II objects to the notion the team can cut loose against these enemies because they're, "just robots", and Luna Snow did some endorsements for the conglomerate at one point, but I'm not sure how much I'm getting about their characters.
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