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Just finished NYC Mech, Volume 1 from Image [caution: the site is Flash only], and I'm still trying to sort it out. Anyone else reading this? Volume 2 is underway right now.
In this gritty NYC re-imagining, the populus is robots. The robots fight, feel, make love, fight, swear (a lot), eat microchips for breakfast (zuh?), and fight.
The first volume attempted, I think, to be unnecessarily abstract and existential. It also hung so loosely together that neither the charatcers nor the world had time to be compelling. After the first two issues, the authors seemingly felt like hitting the "reset" button and starting again, trying but ultimately failing to merge the "two" storylines from the volume in its final (sixth) issue.
The biggest disappointment for me was the fact that the characters were robots but did not have to be. They look cool when they punch the living bolts out of each other, but they don't worry about anything robots should worry about. Robot ethics. Free will. Their programming. Their origins. Hardware failure. Getting wet (see Volume 1, issue 4). If they're not going to worry about these things, why make them robots?
I agree entirely with Publisher's Weekly:
Where the book excels is with MacDonald's art, which captures an off-kilter, stylized world of mecha-humans. NYC Mech has the potential to break new ground, but it hasn't strayed yet from the tried and true.
NYC Mech's aesthetic keeps me coming back (along with the hope that all these disparate threads congeal into comething profound). But it has yet to unpack the wealth of potential it can harness by shifting its focus. |
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