1 gibble out of 5

I guess.  I really liked the cover to this collection, and Burns has a gabby Bendis style of writing that does some cool and casual self-deprecating that’s misleadingly unique sounding.  But I never really liked Bendis.

Here’s the thing: Jason M. Burns is an idea machine.  He has a ton of properties to his name, and a lot of them are pretty sound ideas.  He seems to work in tandem with his artists, which is why his Dummy’s Guide series were probably the most stable, paired with a pretty solid-lined artist like Joe Eisma, but even there Burns main weakness comes into play – that his ideas are based around ideas and not characters.  The original Expendable One collection got by on a forward rush provided by Bryan Baugh’s sloppy, energetic art.  Here, our fractured tale of some big businessman and his robot assassins (or something) is more apparently fractured thanks to be drawing by three different artists.  And as a consequence of, I suppose, growing more comfortable with his characters, Burns ups the ante on our lead’s traits – more swearing, more “insightful” comments, more obvious jokes.

The insightful part is probably the most annoying aspect of things.  I hate to malign Burns, because I love that he’s had so much output and though his over-talkiness does carry over somewhat from book to book, he does shift significant elements of his writing style around to somewhat match each book’s pacing… so I don’t think he’s just shitting these things out… but, well, Expendable One’s high-concept idea is about a guy who can’t die, and so he “uses” that “power” to save people… sometimes sensibly (I can run into a burning building) and sometimes just as an excuse to throw himself off a building.  Burns really digs on this idea of a man grappling with what his life means when he can’t die, and so punctuates many, many pages with what are, I think, meant to be little gems of insight.  Maybe he’s just trying to accurately represent our main character, but if so, our main character is wicked annoying, and so we don’t really want to read about him anyway.

The individual artists are each skilled, by Baugh’s style seemed to define elements of how the series was written and so this second outing seems off.  Plot is senseless, dialogue is grating.  Sorry.