We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us #3 // Review
They’re carrying assault rifles. They’re looking for her father. They know her father as a genius named The Vitruvian. She knows him as many other things. She also knows him as being dead, but they’re not going to believe her. There are some things that she knows that they don’t. There are some things that they know that she doesn’t. No one knows everything in We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us #3. Writer Matthew Rosenberg continues an intriguing pulpy sci-fi action drama with artist Stefano Landini and colorist Jason Wordie. It’s a thoroughly engrossing expansion on aspects of the first couple of issues in the series.
The gentleman who wants The Vitruvian dead calls himself Lord Mortis. He’s a bit out of his depth dealing with a precocious kid who wants to avenge her father’s death. She’s out of her depth dealign with very dangerous super-villain-like people who are after her father. Thankfully, she’s got one of her dad’s robots to help protect her. What she doesn’t know is that the robot in question happens to hold the mind of her “late” father. Letting her know this would put her in more danger than she’s already in...
The gentle complexities of the story are all quite clever. The overarching plot, though...is actually quite simple. And so it’s actually, kind of difficult to feel completely engaged in the story. There's enough there on the surface level to keep it interesting. It's hard. It really is just a family drama. But there's more going on there than simple family drama. Theoretically one could write a story like this with all all the tropes and elements of super villainy. it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. So really this series lives in the weird quirks of life with an evil super genius. It's all in the characterization. And that's actually fun so it ends up being enough to keep the pages turning.
Landini has a very sharp and clever sense of humor that manages a million degrees of subtlety. It's absolutely essential in order to engage the reader in something more sophisticated than what's exists on the surface. The super genius in the body of a robot is kind of difficult to get a full emotional range on. But the artist does a brilliant job of that. The color palette that Wordie is working with feels a little strange and faded. But there's a rich depth that the artist man manages to render with that color nonetheless. overall there's a sense of things dying.
The color seems to be drawing on some of the overall themes of the story. Things are fading. And this certainly is something that feels like the end of an era as this particular super villain connect up with his daughter for the first time. It's an interesting world, but the creative team is bringing to a page here. It's going to be interesting to see where they're taking it from here. But it does definitely have a sense of a dying era in the background. And so it'll be interesting to see where this lands at the end of the current plotline.
