Comic review: Doomed #1- Perfect Teen Gets Powers

Writer: Scott Lobdell
Artist: Javier Fernandez
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 17th June 2015


Doomed #1 is about a boy genius who gains superpowers after being contaminated in a science lab. It is a colourful, playful and inoffensive book, and is suitable for young children to read, unsupervised.

That’s the book, thanks for reading my review.

Okay, I’ll force myself.

The narrative in Doomed #1 follows a perfect specimen of comic book teendom, not much happens, apart from him being perfect. The tone is fluffy and nice. Oh, it does that old trick, starting with a moment of drama, then telling you how it got there. The book follows Mr perfect teen. He has a dream career waiting for him. He has a hot girl after him. He has some nice friends. He cleans a lab, gets contaminated, and is turned into a superhero/villain. This perfect teen is pretty much identical to Peter Parker.

The interesting question posed on the front cover of the comic book (Doomed. Is he hero, or villain?) is not even addressed, let alone resolved, and after finishing the book I’d already lost all interest in the answer to the question anyway.

Mr teen perfect is not real. He’s a cartoon, a happy smiling face on Nickelodeon, and he’s so soft, so unthreatening, so pathetic really. I don’t recall his name, not that it’s important, he could be anybody. Barry, Larry, Harry, whatever. He doesn’t resonate anything, he’s two-dimensional, a blank canvas perfect teen template that the writer can use to service a quick and meaningless comic book narrative that will shift a couple of units, or not.

Here’s an idea. How about writing a comic book tale that has as a protagonist, not a young teen who hasn’t yet experienced anything in life, but somebody a bit older, somebody with more colour, with more baggage, with more character and scope for narrative development?

If you insist on having all of the heroes/villains germinate as teens it limits the possibilities, and what inevitably ends up happening is a book like Doomed #1, with a generic teen protagonist who feels about as real as a fish based character in a Spongebox Squarepants cartoon.

‘But what about the audience,’ I hear the executives cry. Are they having a laugh? Who do they think is reading their comic books in 2015? It’s not teenagers, it’s old blokes like me.

Just go into any comic book shop, and you’ll see a vast variety of beards, but not that many school uniforms.

I don’t want to read about teens. Teens are boring, and they don’t interest me. Teens are just not yet fully formed adults, struggling for attention and faking every thing in a desperate need for attention. Look at me, look at my hair, look at my jacket, and listen to my loud voice and half-witted, ill-researched opinions. No thanks mate, I’d rather not. Come back when you’ve lived a little and have something interesting to say.

So what is the point in this latest teen superhero/villain book? It’s not exactly going to fly off the shelves, is it? Who exactly is calling out for another Spiderman clone book? Who is calling for another book about a teen getting powers in a lab? Who wants to read another book about a perfect teen and how he has troubles balancing, home, work, relationship and super powers in his life? Are people really calling out for this? Perhaps I’m wrong, please tell me if I am. I love being wrong, I really do.

So, again, and bearing in mind that it’s not going to be a best seller, what was the point in this book? Why does it even exist?

I guess it’s not going to offend anybody, so it has that going for it, if nothing else. And as DC is going out of it’s way to not offend anybody these days, then perhaps writer Scott Lobdell has achieved something after all? He’s written a generic teen gets powers comic book that won’t get him into trouble. He’s written a comic book that people won’t notice. He’s written a comic book that will be completely forgotten about this time, tomorrow. Well done Scott. You’ve written another superhero comic book with a teen protagonist that won’t offend anybody, just as DC wants it, and if that’s what they want, that’s what they get.


Rating: 3/10 (Move on, there’s nothing happening here)

Comic review: UFOlogy #1- Do you remember when people used to talk about UFO’s?

Writer: James Tynion IV & Noah J. Yuenkel
Artist: Matthew Fox
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Released: April 1st 2015



Ufology #1 is one of those new comic books that already feels a bit old and dated.

There are a lot of them around these days. Sometimes a nostalgia factor kicks in and I can enjoy them, pretending to myself that the world is not the way it is today I go back in time to my old comic book reading days when things were fun and I didn’t really think about things too much. The problem with Ufology #1 is that it’s not fun enough to allow me to do that.

The book is about teenagers and UFO’s and it has an old radio Art Bell narration thing going on as well, so it already feels of a certain age. The young people are generic, lost, and rebellious in a way that they always are in comic books, but my own experiences of real life never seems to match that cliché. Get ready for another trademark Rorshach Rant. Okay, here we go:

Rebellion is not going to come from the younger generations in 2015.

Children of the post 9/11 generation have been ‘schooled’ by government indoctrination camps masquerading as centres of education. They don’t question, they look to conform, and their only desire is to join a system that wants to use and abuse them. Be a celebrity, be famous, be rich, be a slave to materialism. This is the young, programmed to obey, programmed to conform. All sense of wildness, of rebellion, of questioning authority and establishment lies has been wiped from the choice options of a compliant generation of overly protected and monitored car passengers.

It’s a generation of lazy order followers where God is dead and government has taken his place, but when I read comic books I don’t see anything that resembles children/teenagers in a contemporary context. What I do see is a facsimile of 1980’s rebellious kids, but with mobile phones in their hands just to make the reader think that these kids could actually exist today.

Ufology #1 is centred on a rebellious, confident, intelligent young girl. Her Dad is a cop. He is friendly and cool and lets her do pretty much whatever she likes, driving her around to have a date with a boy who he has never even met. It’s pretty ridiculous.

A cop, the most scared, paranoid, distrustful, government enslaved, power tripping, morality free, order following people alive today and he acts like a liberal parent from 1967. It’s terrible, and it takes me completely out of the story. I can’t believe this is real. This is fake, and thus the magic trick that is story telling is broken. I can’t read these people, as they are not people, they don’t exist.

The subject matter of this book, being about UFO’s, is not very ‘cool’ really, is it? UFO’s are something that old people used to talk about when they were younger, and the people still hanging on, still looking at the sky are starting to thin out now. Kids don’t look at the sky anymore, they look at their phones, so any book about flying saucers is only really going to an attract an older audience. UFOs might have been cool, but not now.

The comic book felt too long, and it lost my attention well before the end. It concluded with some panels featuring something to do with aliens that were designed to pique my interest; to make me want to keep on reading, to buy issue #2, but all they did was confuse me. I didn’t quite understand what was going on, and that is okay in a book that interests me, but when a book is starting to bore me it becomes a chore to go back, re-read and make sure I understand what is happening.

I did go back though. I re-read the story, and it still bored me. I’m writing this review feeling a bit fed up with it now, hence my pessimism about the whole thing.

So why did it bore me? I’m a guy in his forties, so I should like a book about UFO’s right? Yeah, I might have enjoyed the book when I was twenty something and UFO’s were cool and interesting, before the Internet and before everything else that has happened in the world in the past twenty years, but not now.

Plus, I don’t really want to read about teenagers AGAIN in my comic books.

Why has it always got to be about bloody teenagers when the writers must be aware that it’s only old people like myself who are actually buying the books? And if you insist on writing about teenagers then at least make them interesting and believable teenagers.

The rebellious young girl protagonist in this book doesn’t even come across as a real person to me. She’s a comic book character created by some old writer. She’s somebody for a pedestal, somebody to admire, but you know she isn’t real. She’s a ghost, a comic book cliché that comes with the requisite feminist liberal credentials, but she’s been done so many times before and there’s nothing there for me to grab hold of, to orientate myself with reality or to care about. I can’t care about a statue. I can’t care about a con. I can’t care about something that is evidently not real.

Ufology #1 isn’t a terrible book; it’s something worse than that. It’s a blah book that washes over you and metaphorically disintegrates into dust the moment you attempt to interact with it. It’s UFO’s and old paranormal radio shows, and it’s the young teen female rebel from 1986 who doesn’t exist today. It’s vapour, dust, old, a memory, something that has been done, something that used to be something, something that is fading as fast as a dream of a ghost that was never really there.



Rating: 4/10 (Boring)