Review of Matamoros
I got a review copy of Darius LaMonica and Sleet's Matamoros, which is drawn by John Cox, and quite enjoyed it. The hero of the story, Charles Sobietti, is a war veteran who's served in Iraq as well, and suffered the loss of his arm in battle after being hit by a landmine made by Iranian terrorists. A senoir officer, Colonel Oldenberg, offers him the possibility to undergo an operation to restore limbs through some kind of strange new technology for regrowing/restoring limbs and other important organs.Charles applies for the operation in Texas, and it turns out to be better than he expected - not only does it give him a new arm and repair his damaged lung, it gives him an ability or two vaguely reminiscient of the Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman, two TV series that, while based on a sci-fi novel, could easily have gotten some of their inspiration from comics as well.
As much as Charles would like to return to the battlefield, he's discharged from the army, though they say they'll consider recalling him to duty. While spending time back home with the family in New York, he overhears two men speaking in Arabic at a diner downtown, discussing what sounds like a terrorist plot. But when Charles, after tracking them further and discovering more about their evil plans, tries to offer an anonymous tip to the police by phone, he's turned down on the grounds that there's a new law passed that prevents them from taking anonymous tips, because of a new law "passed after some passengers reported a suspicious incident on a plane," which is an allusion to the "flying imams" in Minnesota, an incident that may have been deliberately planned. If the police don't follow the procedures required, "the ACLU will be all over us!" So, Charles decides to take matters into his own hands and try to stop the thugs himself.
It's a very impressive story of a guy who undergoes a special operation and uses the abilities he's acquired in order to stop what could be a horrific terrorist plot. Now that I think of it, this could be the kind of story that Frank Castle, the Punisher, could've starred in if Marvel Comics had some more sensible management today. Unfortunately, they do not. I know that Frank Castle may have suffered some serious damage after 1995, when they turned him into some kind of a supernatural being, but it was after Garth Ennis took up writing Frank that things really took a turn for the worse. How would Frank Castle, a man whose family was murdered in a gangland attack in New York, feel if his family had been murdered by Islamic terrorists? And here goes Ennis putting Frank in a story where he refuses to take up on an offer to track down bin Laden. On the one hand, of course it could trivialize real life if he really had gone directly after bin Laden. On the other hand, the whole notion that Frank would consider Islamofascists less important than the gangland thugs he's usually dedicated his life to defeating is ludicrous and insulting, and creates a crazy double-think type of personality for him.
Matamoros ends with a special afterword by LaMonica where he tells of what led him and Sleet to write this book, which was Marvel editorial's killing off Capt. America last year, something that drew the following reaction from co-creator Joe Simon: "It's a hell of a time for him to go. We really need him now." Yet Steve Rogers' death was what made headlines last year. By contrast, look at how even much of the comic book medium has been largely silent about this gem of a book. For an industry that supposedly wants to save itself from the colossal slump it fell into since pamphlet comics were banished from major bookstores, it's hard to understand how they can turn their backs on something that might help save it.
I strongly recommend Matamoros for everyone and anyone who'd like to see a story with a premise much better than anything you'll see from Marvel, DC, and a lot of other companies that have shown little to no interest since 2000 in dealing with bold subjects like combatting terrorism. This is something that does a much better job than many mainstream comics are doing now.
Labels: indie publishers, islam and jihad, terrorism
