BRZRKR: Volume Two

Wow, this was a big disappointment. I mentioned at the end of my notes on BRZRKR: Volume One that it set the hook well and left me wanting more, but I can’t even give the issues collected here credit for giving readers more of the same. It’s just less of the same, if that makes sense.

The main thing I was left wanting after the first volume was a supervillain who matched up against Unute’s awesome strength and unkillability. Well, that doesn’t happen. In fact, there is no villain at all in this part of the story, unless you count Caldwell, the shady (and very familiar) government scientist who is researching into the secret of Unute’s power so that he can clone an army of Berserkers. Or Brzrkrs. This is all what’s known as . . . wait for it . . . Project X.

That’s such a tired storyline, and there’s nothing interesting done with it here. Meanwhile, there’s nothing added to Unute’s backstory either aside from the suggestion that his powers didn’t come from a sky god but some alien intelligence. It’s all left pretty murky. Murkier even than it was in the first volume, which is part of what I mean when I say this is all less of the same.

There’s also less bloody action, and indeed the only action at all is in the first section. But it’s not as gory and over-the-top and the scene where Unute (or “B,” as he is more often referred to) is drawn and quartered, only to be inevitably reconstituted later, just struck me as silly. I don’t even want to go on. There’s no story here at all but only four issues of a comic spinning its wheels and getting nowhere – which is the usual middle stretch of any trilogy – with art that wasn’t selling me on the boring highlights. I guess you need a double-page spread for the explosion we’ve been counting down to from the opening frame, but . . . it’s just an explosion in the desert. We’re left with a “to be continued” but I don’t know if I’m in for any more as the whole thing seems to have run into a ditch.

Graphicalex