1 out of 5

This guy says it all.

(Like that ever stopped me before.)

The aspect I think he neglects to mention is that, in pre-pub press, writer Kevin McCarthy and artist Kyle Baker mentioned the purposeful Osamu Tezuka-isms (Astroboy) spread upon ‘Circuit Breaker.’  Besides this, though (which really just gives us context for the Japanese sound effects and obvious manga look), I couldn’t agree more with the point of the linked review, which you should really read now, in that there are occasions where you can tell you’re not the target audience, but in the case of CB, it’s hard to tell what that target would be.  Sure, Astroboy fans, except the pitch – a robot-hating future wherein a… robot built enclave for humans has… outlawed… robots, while everyone happily uses smartphones and other winky modern-day tech-obsessed references, and in which a human-looking robot goes around doing good deeds for both ‘bot and human alike – is madly confused, and descends into blank-faced dumb when our lead character (whose name I’m too lazy to flip back through the book to reference) spits out the history mentioned above… and then rewinds one page later to tell us the same history with her own inserted into it.  Yes, as though the author spilled his exposition onto the page, realized he forgot crucial points, but the ink was permanent and so he just wrote some notes in the margins and then smudged it to try to make it look like it was always like that.  And then to top it off, she hangs a lampshade on it by calling it an info dump.  Yes, ha ha, fuck your mother.

I’ve not been keen on Kyle Baker’s work elsewhere, but also agreed with the review that it’s really unappealingly rough here.  Perhaps that was to separate the look from Astroboy, but if you’re going with a cartoony cartoonist and going forward with the general manga vibe… well, why the difference?  Which wraps back around to the question of who this book is written for: it’s not smart enough to be a B-comic spin on the genre, and it’s not a cheeky enough to feel like tribute.  It seems pretty honest in its story representation, which, unfortunately, means that it’s just pretty bad.

Womp.