Metal Society #2 // Review
The scrappy underdog Rosa has helped to secure more employment opportunities for humans. Naturally, there's going to be a little bit of fallout. There are going to be victims. Construction bot WOL-421313 finds himself unemployed. It's only going to be a matter of time before things get crazy for everyone involved. Rosa will be challenged to the first-ever robot-human fight in Metal Society #2. Writer Zack Kaplan's 5-part story continues to make its way toward the inevitable showdown between muscle and metal in an issue brought to the page by artist Guilherme Babli and colorist Marco Lesko.
One week before the fight, WOL-421313 is being interviewed for a talk show. Life hasn't been easy for the bot, who has been struggling with serious issues. His companion bot has left him as he has lost his job, and there isn't much that he will be able to do to make up for it. The only thing that's left for him is a head-on confrontation with the humans. Meanwhile, Rosa's found some footing and an emotional grounding in a life of new opportunities for humans. She's challenged to a fight that will discover whether she's metal enough to face a bot head-to-head.
Kaplan's story is cute. Really. It's adorable. Man versus machine in a world that casts humans as second-class citizens against classic pulpy metal-looking sci-fi robots. The problem is that Kaplan seems to have focussed too narrowly on trying to translate the upper-middle-class world into the story's pulpy sci-fi robot culture. The robots aren't mechanized enough to contrast thematically against the human society that's trying to assert itself. Mechanization of the workplace is a fascinating topic and one worth exploring in a sci-fi format. Still, the story that Kaplan is putting to the page in Metal Society doesn't delve far enough into AI/human relations to explore the connection's nature. It's cute and silly when it could be so much more.
The visual world of Metal Society feels strikingly enjoyable. Babli solidly fuses the old-time notion of robots and their classic iconography with the contemporary workplace's naturalistic, earthbound visual reality. Robots have very human postures and moods. The emotional state of the metal seems remarkably vivid. Lesko's cast a bleary mood over the page that gleams and shines when it needs to...and dives into murky shadow when the moment is appropriate.
The challenge with a series like Metal Society is to take each issue on its own terms. Two installments into a five-part story, the series is still very much a work in progress. It's difficult to tell where everything is headed, and the final themes that Kaplan and company will explore won't be totally apparent until the smoke clears on the final issue. So far, Kaplan is telling an interesting enough story to keep the pages turning.
