There's absolutely no excuse for what I'm about to inflict on you, so I'm going to drop a Shift Blame cantrip to direct your attention towards @angry0historian. It's all his fault. Here I was, minding my own business, browsing Steemit in search of quality content worthy of my hilariously-tiny 8-cent upvote, and I come across this Quick Update from him.
Included is this picture:
Doom: 2099? Well, shit...you done did the thing, @angry0historian.
Now I've got 90's comics on the brain, so instead of doing something useful with my time like catching up on sleep, I'm down in the basement, digging through long boxes, in search of something I can write about that will entice readers like you Upvote out of pity, and Resteem from a desire to humiliate the geek.
I've found just the thing in Atomic ANGELS #1, so crank some Pearl Jam and...
Before I talk about the book itself, I want to say a few words about why it appears in my collection. See, I have a slight problem...I'm a fan of Gen13. In my defense, I tried hard to hold out, but I was a teenager in the 90's and though I managed to resist it for several years, I too eventually succumbed. I was then bitten by the urge to collect approximately freakin' everything associated with Gen13 no matter how tangentially. So go ahead and look at that cover again and see if you can spot the reason I plunked down $2.95 for this book in May of 1996:
See there in the upper-right corner? If you were a teenager in the mid-90's, you knew those killer shades and pink bangs could only belong to one person: Roxanne Spaulding, aka 'Freefall' of (wait for it...) Gen13. Cross-overs sell books to suckers, folks, and I am the evidence. Freefall lends absolutely zilch to the storyline of this issue, and I bought it anyway.
Fight me.
"Bikes, babes, action...Atomik ANGELS is a GenXer's Dream come true!" -- Ian M. Feller, Combo Magazine!!, certified wanker
So, what are the "Atomik Angels" anyway?
That's...a really good question. Given this is their first appearance in comics, within issue #1 of their four-issue limited series, you'd think it's a question writer Peter Gutierrez would want to answer as quickly as possible. You would think that, but you would be wrong. This is why most people hate 90's comics, because they pull crap like this.
Atomik ANGELS is the creation of William Tucci, and if that name rings a bell, it's because he created comic book sensation Shi, one of the few books to escape the debauchery of nineties comics relatively unscathed, reputation intact. The same, however, cannot be said of the Atomik ANGELS, mainly because while Tucci created them, he signed their fates over to other people. What resulted was not pretty.
The story of Atomik ANGELS is so forgettable I literally had to re-read a comic I had read a mere thirty minutes earlier so I could write about it. This is a bad sign. The main problem is Gutierrez trying too hard to be mysterious and literary with the script. Rule number one for penning a limited series with no prior backstory is to get to the point ASAP, flesh out details later. Unfortunately, Atomik ANGELS #1 opens with a full page of text superimposed over the background image of an atomic bomb detonation. "From the Memoirs of Noah Carpenter" announces the page header.
"Who?" is my reaction.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is a very well-written page. I like it a lot: it's informative, atmospheric, and it would inspire me to give the rest of your novel a chance if I flipped to it in the bookstore. But this isn't a novel -- prose like this has no place in a comic book. It especially has no place on the first page of the first issue of your comic book, it really especially doesn't belong on the first page of the first issue of a comic book aimed at the audience who consumes books like Gen13 and X-Men religiously, and it double-secret, not-even-kidding especially doesn't belong there if you aren't going to introduce the guy who wrote it until twelve zarking pages later, when we've already forgotten his name because we're trying to remember all the other people introduced in the previous dozen pages.
Page two shows a man voluntarily fall to his death out of a skyscraper, with the accompanying text boxes explaining this is the opening salvo of a terrorist plot led by someone named Lennox. Who's Lennox? Why, he's--
No time for that, amigo! We've got Joe Sharkey to introduce, AKA a slightly less-pissed Nick Fury with twice as many functional eyes.
He's putting his agents through their paces. Those agents are D.C., Zoo, and Sasha. D.C.'s playing with rocket boots, Zoo's trying to push her way out of a trash compactor, and Sasha's holding her breath underwater. We're treated to their inner monologues, and I gotta say, I'm not convinced these three are capable of fighting split ends, much less some terrorist whose sole super-power seems to be suggesting people dive off buildings to make a statement. Bitchy in-fighting ensues, because everyone knows you can't put three teenage girls in a room without one of them having a cow at one of the others, so Sharkey orders D.C. and Zoo to the A-V Center.
Dear God, not...the Audio-Visual Center! Have you no heart, sir?!
I'm rapidly running out of facepalms here. This better start picking up.
Next page we meet our terrorist. Anybody who can convince a guy to voluntarily swan-dive into concrete must be the scariest motherfucker this side of Jason Voorhees, so we're all eager to get a look at this guy, and...
...you know what? I'm not saying a thing. I'm not just speechless, I'm keyboard speechless. There's nothing I can write to explain this. Nothing. This foppish dandy couldn't talk a cop out of giving him a speeding ticket, but you'd gladly go skydiving without a parachute to get away from him. Lennox, if nothing else, has committed high-crimes and misdemeanors against fashion and deserves the kicking the Atomik ANGELs will doubtless render unto his hindquarters. (In a later issue though; they only fight amongst themselves in this one).
The SWAT team sent to storm the building where Lennox and the rest of his off-off-Broadway bimbos are hiding is rendered ineffectual by infrasound, which is not at all how that works, but it's the 90's so screw science and pretend the writer knows what he's talking about. Never mind, we still have one member of the team who hasn't shown up to work yet. Time to introduce him now that it's page thirteen:
Just say no, kids. JUST. SAY. NO.
Freefall cameos her way into the book not to help the Atomik ANGELS, but rather because she's been scoping this guy out. Not for his abs or his surly caveman/fratboy persona (let's face it, she's got one of those at home already in Grunge), but because he drives a beautiful crotch rocket of a motorbike.
Never mind this is a girl who can fly under her own power, show her a hot-rod cycle and you can add her panties to your collection.
"AUTHOR NEEDS FACEPALMS BADLY!"
Who said that?
Anyway, Stag (it's on his helmet; it's his nickname, he reminds Freefall and the audience) shows exceptional prowess by handling a motorcycle in direct contradiction of the laws of both nature and physics, narrowly avoiding pancaking both himself and Roxy, zipping between oncoming biker gang members like he's performing bike-mounted Parkour, then goes full douchebag by confronting the bikers when they come looking for an apology and zapping their rides with some kind of built-in electromagnetic pulse. Good thing Freefall's around though, because while the EMP fries their bikes, it only pisses the gang off. Once she upends a trashcan on them using her powers of levitation though, we see ketchup and mustard must be their critical weakness, as they're never seen or heard from again.
Just as we might get some semblance of characterization from Stag's discovery there's more to Roxy than meets the eye, a VTOL arrives to ferry him to Sharkey's ultra-important meeting. In New York. Roxy's pissed because he's stranding her in the desert next to a hot dog stand, but again, she is capable of flight. Gee, that twenty minute trip back to La Jolla must be so inconvenient.
Hey, Sharkey, just a thought: if you need your team to assemble at a certain time and place, maybe make sure they're all on the same coast and not split 3/4ths in New York and 1/4th in California? That way you don't have to rent an SR-71 just to fly him across the country so he can jump out of the plane and parachute on to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Intrepid, an act which wouldn't look at all suspicious and in no way endanger the location of your super-ultra-top-whisper-secret headquarters, I'm sure.
Now that Stag's crashed the party, missed the briefing, and gotten himself shot with a flamethrower for being late, D.C. decides she's sick of Sharkey's games and storms off. Sharkey stops her tantrum by projecting the estimated range of whatever doomsday weapon the Atomik ANGELS are being prepped to stop, and suddenly it's mouths-agape for everybody as order is restored.
We cut to a two-page spread featuring short profiles on all four ANGELS (a term which, we find out, is an acronym meaning American Nuclear-tolerant Genetically Engineered Life formS), giving us way more character information than anything in the previous pages.
The book closes with an "Addendum" to the first page, which is another wall of text explaining more about Noah Carpenter, his experiments in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project, and how the ANGELs (lower-case 's' in this part of the story, upper-case everywhere else) came to be. This and the previous two pages are all things that should have been introduced via story narrative, not info-dumped on the audience at the front and back of the book.
Atomik ANGELS #1 is a textbook example of everything wrong with comic books in the 1990's, and yet I'm just as much to blame as the writer, artists, letterer, and colorist, because I paid real money for this.
So heap your scorn. I deserve it. I deserve it. Just save some for the creative forces behind this book too, because I cannot take all the responsibility.
@angry0historian and @cryplectibles, ball's in your court now. Got any comic sins for which you would seek absolution? I can't be the only one in the confessional when the dust clears. ;)