3 out of 5

‘Tis about as standard as it comes.  The ‘Harlem Heroes’ collected in these two floppies is a 90s reboot of an older series.  I can’t speak to the Heroes of the original, but Heroes 90s cast our main troupe as prisoners who’ve excelled at the allowed sport of Aeroball while incarcerated, apparently earning the HH nickname with their acclaim.  Fleisher – with some pretty meticulous art from Kev Walker and Steve Dillon – goes through the paces of giving each character a name and an attribute – leader, rebel, thinker, etc. – and establishes that no one escapes from this prison right before letting us in on the notion that the Heroes are planning an escape.  Spoiler: they succeed.  …Except they’re immediately swooped up by an agency called The Office, who plan to employ the Heroes “special skills” (yes, it’s one of those plots) to gain back control of an undesirable (read: not profitable for The Office) government.  The Office dudes wear sunglasses and stand in shadow most of the time, so we don’t trust them.  There’s a lot of bickering in team – one of the nice touches by Fleisher, actually, that the leader role assumed by a dude named Deacon is frequently contested by the crew – and so they half-trust each other.  The “special skills” employment requires some undercover work, so not much trust there.  And the prison warden is still angry about the escape, so cue some goons making chase as well.  Standard action setup, then, but not unentertaining.  The plot moves pretty quickly, Fleisher not really paying much attention to a page-by-page structure to shuffle through scenes to set up some new twist or combatant, and we’re going by “if he shoots at us he’s bad and can thus die” rules, so our ‘Heroes’ aren’t really all that heroic but it’s all fine in fantasy land.

The art loses Kev Walker about midway through, or he plays less of a role, and the pages start to look predominantly Dillon, which is to say they lose a bit of the grit Walker brought.  Dillon is reliable on art, but not the most dynamic.  This story, at 28 parts, was also apparently too big for a full collection, so the floppies rather disconcertingly end at part 22, with the next floppy not seeming like it’s going to complete the tale…  It’s not the worst prog on which to end it, and you can pretty much make assumptions about where the thing is going, but it seems odd to just drop the story as such.

Absolutely competent art and writing with some dashes of quirk here and there, ‘Harlem Heroes’ does seem to typify the generally maligned ‘average’ 90s era of 2000 AD.