2 out of 5

I’m going to not have many great things to say about this series, and I want to apologize for that. It’s not fun to tear things apart, and that’s not exactly the plan, as there’s a lot of solid work done across this series in both the art and writing – I would not have completed reading it otherwise. But because I think some of its initial premise is, by my take, flawed, certain problems with the plotting and pacing just ended up stacking up over the run, frustrating what had the potential to be a very strong set of books. The premise is tricky, though, and I can’t say I can solve for it to my satisfaction either, so writer Zack Kaplan may’ve just written himself into a corner from the start.

That premise is misleadingly straight forward: do a social class drama, but in a world where robots have become the dominant “race,” taking charge when humans do-as-they-do-best and destroy themselves. Our magnanimous bots then eventually reintroduce the human race through breeding, using them as a workforce. It’s a clever spin that taps into timely AI concerns, as well as presenting a new in for examining issues like racism and classism in general, exploding the topic in a way that maybe enables us to consider our own behaviors without pointing to / referencing some modern examples toward which we may already have bias.

Representing the sides of this conversation are human Rosa Genthree, and robot builder WOL-421313: when Rosa, as part of a fomenting (but attemptedly peaceful) human uprising makes a bid for better jobs to the robot government, it causes the already deposed WOL to lose their job, and to be repurposed elsewhere. As the robot method for resolving disputes that logic cannot is fighting (I heave one of my first big sighs here), WOL challenges Rosa to a battle – the first such robot vs. human battle in this new world, which then becomes quite the political tentpole for both sides.

Let’s swallow the fighting resolution concept as best we can. It’s not completely out of the question, but it’s an example of where Kaplan starts to (from my reader’s perspective) hastily slap together world building extensions, and story shortcuts: things that make sense within the world’s context, and things that thematically make sense, or visually make sense in order to cue the reader into something, but really need a bit more explanation / justification to not seem silly. Silly like, y’know, tits on a robot.

Yeah, ’cause there’s a girl robot with booby lumps who dumps WOL (or, I’m sorry, declines recharging with him) for a robot of a higher station, and that was about when I started to feel like Metal Society was getting way too cute with its robot human behavior proxies, and juxtpositions. And while the boobs were maybe an editor’s suggestion, or artist Guilherme Balbi’s addition, the way the pages are continually presented to mirror Genthree’s interactions with other humans with WOL’s with other robots was surely in script, with the same being true for the – again, by my take – pointless inclusion of time jumps, forward and back. Because we start with our endpoint – the fight – and then go into flashback city. Absolutely acceptable. …And then we go into flash-forward city, though not quite up to fight night yet, then flashback again, then flashforward to a different time, flashback to a different flashbacked time, and so on, and so on. And all of this is done to just keep stacking up those “Robots! They’re just like us!” comparisons, which are already too much after the first time. In other words: we really didn’t need five issues of this, and it didn’t benefit from being told in its non-linear way.

There’s something to this in the art as well. While Balbi’s process pages show how tightly laid out the thumbnails are to the finals – they’re very close (though maybe we’re getting later drafts and not first ones) – there’s something uncanny valley about a lot of the faces once filled in. Not Greg Land territory – I get kind of an early Giuseppe Camuncoli vibe from the linework – but the vibe is the same as experienced from Land’s, where the faces and poses just don’t quite feel “alive.” Which, y’know, works in a metatextual sense, but I doubt that was the point. And I should say I really do like Balbi’s art, and I appreciated the balance in the robot design (okay, tits aside), achieving functionally believable humanoid structures that have “emotion” without being too goofy about it; but it’s the kind of stuff that works great for covers and money shots, but can feel stiff for more emotional scenes. The flipside of this: it works great for action shots, specifically in the fighting, as it’s like a photographer snapping away at each move.

…And those emotional scenes are further stiffened by the story’s reliance on all those increasingly obvious robo / hume comparisons, which really end up leaving Kaplan no way out of this story except for an equally obvious one, and with a heavy dollop of cheeseball moralizing to boot.

Metal Society is a great concept, and even if the way into it is clunky, the story has a lot of potential. But instead of pushing into that, the book twiddles its narrational thumbs to try to be clever, and reduces most of its characters down to single emotional beats to sell some bigger points that don’t really challenge us to much dig into the subject matter. The book ends up dragging as a result, making its storytelling shortcuts – though understandable at a high level – a bit more grating than a more compact telling of this tale might’ve otherwise.