Final Boss #7 // Review
Tommy’s hand is on fire. Typically this might be cause for concern in a one-on-one fighting situation. The people in charge of the tournament don’t seem at all concerned that Tommy’s fists have burst into flames. And he’s too busy beating the hell out of his opponent to really be too concerned about it in Final Boss #7. Writer/artist Tyler Kirkham, artist David Miller and colorist Ifansyah Noor continue a tribute to rugged, meaty old school action with another issue of a series inspired by one-on-one fighting video games.
There are a whole lot of people watching the fight between Tommy and Knight Owl. She’s fighting with all the poise and precision of someone who is 11 points faster than Tommy. (That’s from the stat block that was published in issue # 6.) Anyway...that IS him standing dramatically on the cover behind a huge Image Comics logo, so there’s no question that he’s going to win the fight. The real questions is: what is everyone going to do when they demand that he kill her?
There really isn’t a whole lot to Tommy that seems all that interesting. The fact that there’s something about his family that he’s trying to find out doesn’t make me care about him. And honestly...that’s all in the background anyway. It’s really more about the fighting and the fact that...being a hero means that Tommy doesn’t want to kill a noble warrior. Even that is really remarkably cliche. So there really isn’t much about it that feels genuinely engaging. It’s all pretty silly and superficial. The video game format of the script is interesting, but the video game format is...interactive. It can afford to be superficial because the format of a video game is supporting a fundamentally different kind of experience.
It’s big. It’s dumb. It’s brutal, but only in the most superficial way imaginable. The anatomy is silly enough that it might have been drawn by Liefeld. The action slams its way across page and panel. The action tends to hit the page in extremely tight close-ups that feel cluttered and claustrophobic. The power of the impact never really hits the page the way it could if Kirkham would finesse the page with a bit more negative space to contrast against the big, occasionally flaming slab of beef that serves as the protagonist.
It would be really funny if Tommy Brazen was killed before the end of the series. It’s not going to happen, but Kirkham would be that much more impressive an author if he took his rugged, meaty cliche protagonist and just...killed him before he had a chance to finish the tedious search for family history that serves as the emotional center for the story. Final Boss is a throwback to an earlier era of bash-em-up male superhero stories that never really managed to get beyond the central conflict and address any larger themes. It would be fascinating to see it take a sudden pivot away from all of that.
