4 out of 5

‘Ordinary’ is just an all-around good comic.  It looks good, it read well, it’s paced well, it’s lettered uniquely but not distractingly, and it has a bright but natural color palette.  That it works so effectively as a mini is also fun, seeing as how it was initially serialized in the Judge Dredd meg, stories from which, frankly, often read best in their bite-sized formats.

One morning, Michael wakes up in his messy apartment – interrupted from a self-defeating dream wherein he gets turned down for sex by Scarlett Johansson – to the sound of a ringing phone.  He’s late for work.  On the street, he runs into two big doofuses who shove him around and demand the $200 owed to their boss, Haka.  Michael, we are being shown, is a loser.  As he scrambles to a job we find out is that of a plumber, odd things start happening on the street – a child’s touch turns things to gold; a man turns into a pile of goo.  And as he’s waiting around his latest job with his plumbing partner, said partner turns into a bear while their customer de-ages from a grandmother to a young woman to a baby and into nothing.  The whole world is suddenly developing strange mutations or powers.  …Except Michael.  He doesn’t get any.

It’s a hilarious setup and one of the best things about it is that it’s not a cheat.  We’re not force-fed some lame lesson at the end about how Michael’s humanity is his best gift, or that he has a secret power all along, or etc.  Nope.  As government agents pair off – those who believe the powers should be used for good and those who want to find a cure – the man with the difference in his blood, Mike, becomes the man to track down, when all he wants to do is pursue a sudden desire to get back into contact with his estranged son.

‘Ordinary’ does end up leaving some large and small plot pieces either untouched or ignored – the boy’s mother is shown and then… not shown, and we briefly explore Michael’s ‘dreams’ via a bum who can bring visions to life but it’s not given enough time to really sell it – but Williams moves on, and because the plot does unfold sensibly (within reason, of course), it doesn’t feel like we’re being shorted, exactly, more that necessary scenes were prioritized, but Rob didn’t want to sacrifice some level of awareness of these other elements.  The balance ends up working because of the overall quality execution, but this is one of those instances where another issue of space might’ve allowed for making this a bit more effective than simply entertaining.

Either way, highly recommended: this is a book that wants to be a movie (and poos on all of Millar’s high-concept pitches by actually being written well), but is already great as a comic so there’s really no need.  Unless Rob and D’Israeli want the paycheck, in which case, Hollywood, you have my approval.