3 out of 5

While worthy of the attention it’s release nabbed, Robinson’s pseudo-confessional Airboy doesn’t end up using it’s unique meta setup to accomplish much from cover to cover.  It ends up where it should, but the first issue antics build to an awesome cliffhanger that the writer just dangles from for the next few issues, just pulling himself to safety for that final page.

So Airboy is one of those “it’s about what it’s about” books; it opens with James Robinson on the toilet, taking a call from Image guy Eric Stephenson, asking him to give a shot at an Airboy “revamp,” as the title is in the public domain.  James frets about doing more Golden Age stuff, since he feels like he’s pigeon-holed into that genre, then gets his artist for the book lined up – Greg Hinkle, yes, who drew these four issues – and takes him out for a night of utter debauchery in the hopes of knocking some plot ideas loose.  James trades off shockingly honest (we assume) feelings on his writing, writing the comic book version of himself as completely self-absorbed, while the characters drink and drug and sex their way through the pages.  And in the morning, post coke and blowjobs and heroin and E, Airboy himself appears in full color – the book otherwise presented in all blue/green tones – and asks what’s going on.  It’s a great setup, and seemingly justifies all of the crassness as a setup for being presented with a manifestation of the morals of a different era.

The second book follows the inevitable thread of getting Airboy adjusted to our world; it’s a bit of a letdown from issue one, as it’s the hijinx you’d expect – while James and Greg debate the nature of this shared certainly hallucination, but it’s again a valid path to get to the next stage in our story, when Airboy, aghast at the dregs of the world post the war in which, in his reality, he’s fighting, rips the comic book creatives into the Airboy world.

Here’s where the concept stops holding together.  While Robinson takes the proper tactic of trying to show us that Airboy’s world is just as fractured, such that James will learn some lesson to take back to our world to stop complaining and get to work, the way it’s written unfortunately plays out with the overkill of the first issue.  It feels like we’re stalled on the crassness.  Robinson also overuses a timing technique of having a character say something notable, then a no-dialogue reaction shot, then a “what did you say?” followup for both attemptedly poignant moments as well as gags.  This both forces the “point” of things upon us while diminishing its impact, and the dicks-and-farts approach at showing us Airboy’s flaws is so purposefully without subtlety that we must question the necessity of that approach from the very start.  It no longer feels like a useful juxtaposition, but more like a cheap way to grab our attention.  The stalling holds for issue four, which involves James and Greg in an Airboy battle for no real reason other than to add some climactic onto a book that’s just James’ musings.

Now take a look back up at that rating.

None of this makes for a bad comic book.  Hinkle’s art is fantastic, and though the presentation is uneven, the idea is clever and some of Robinson’s confessions are refreshing to hear, humanizing the writer in a very direct way.  That it follows a pretty predictable redemption story angle and that it uses poo humor to do so has its pluses, but the minuses keep the book from edging into something revelatory, or affecting.  It would’ve been interesting to actually have this developed as a series, perhaps giving James time to develop the Modern Age cynicism / Golden Age naivety a bit more smoothly.  It didn’t happen that way, though, so instead we got four entertaining books with lots of penis shots and swear words.