3 out of 5

Mean Machine Angel, as scripted by John Wagner, is sort of a one-joke character.  It’s a funny joke, thankfully, and when paired with artists like Carl Critchlow, whose expressive styles can wring the most out of such an absurd creation, the joke gets even more mileage.  Richard Dolan, pretty as his paints are, is a bit too on the realistic side, though, making the opening ‘Travels With Muh Shrink’ thrills in this collection the lowpoint – the humor just doesn’t land – and one of the other longrunners, ‘Angel Heart,’ has SinDex’s David Millgate, but this looks like it was from the 90s, so over-violence and digital colors sort of mar that one, too.

That joke, by the way, goes as follows: Angel has a dial on his head that he clicks up to 4 when he gets angry, threatening to head butt so-and-so to a greasy spot.  And don’t you dare tell Mean what to do, else he’ll go up to four on ya’ and head butt ya’…  You’ll hear that a lot.  A lot of ‘Bok’ sound effects for head-buttin’, and a lot of Dredd fearin’ Machine in a full butting frenzy.  He’s hair-trigger insanity, and almost every strip collected in here is about someone coming up with a scheme to tame that insanity, whether it’s through hypnosis, or surgery, or whatnot.

It’s amusing, but when we get flashes of guys like Gordon Rennie actually expanding on the character a bit, or when Wagner adds some more flesh to his story with a Mean Machine kid in that Critchlow set of thrills, it becomes more than just a one-beat joke, and thus memorable enough to be worthy of rereads.