Blood & Thunger #16 // Review
It might well have been a totally rational idea. The Fulminator was supposed to be a totally new tool for policing. It was a firearm with its own AI that allowed for targeting and variable ammunition. It could help the officer decide what he or she needed to use and how best to aim. It was potentially a noble idea that would protect both the peacekeeping officer AND the people he or she was sworn to protect and serve. Of course...things are never so simple as becomes quite apparent in Blood & Thunger #16. Writer Benito Cereno and artist E.J Su continue the compelling sci-fi adventure of a girl and her gun. Colors comes to the page courtesy of Msassyk.
Thunder is explaining this to a few other guns that are all waiting to be destroyed. Blood is looking to try to find a way to save Thunder, but she’s kind of having some difficulty with that. In order for her to download a map that would help her out, she’s going to need to activate location services, which is going to alert security to the fact that she is where she is. Guards will come for her. The rest will be predictable. If she’s going to save Thunder, she’s going to have to find a way around the facility that doesn’t involve alerting the guards...
Cereno’s AI-related humor is particularly sharp. Much of the better end of the script reads like a particularly clever riff on Douglas Adams’ work. Some of the AI humor reads like a particularly smart update on Adams’ Sirius Cybernetics Corporation humor. The adaptive A.I. trying to be of service is sharp stuff. The humor fits perfectly within a deeply enjoyable adventure that finds Blood entering a very secure facility and then...being forced to save much more than just her gun. Fun stuff.
There’s a sharp precision about Su’s art that serves this particular issue quite well. The central conflict involves one girl and a whole bunch of guns. Theoretically, those guns could be drawn to be a little bit more anthropomorphized. There might be a tendency to want to do that just in general with a story that leans so heavily in the fdirection of smart guns. Su does a really good job of maintaining the essence of the technology without amplifying it at all. The whole prediction of the artwork maintains a slickly appealing science fiction look for the current issue.
The aggression of the story feels really interesting. Blood is in a really cool position at the end of the issue. It's a cool newer development that could be an interesting things moving forward. The implications for what's going to happen moving forward become really compelling. The title characters are out of the immediate danger and their situation has changed just a little bit. Some of the deeper philosophically implications of the title characters in their situation and that'll be really interesting. It'll be fun to watch this one in the future.
