3 out of 5

After a pause, Steve – minus Nick Manabat – follows up on the Cybernary threads he’d started to weave in the back of Deathblow.  And minus Nick Manabat, things flounder a bit, as Steve cops to later on.  It’s not that artist Jeff Rebner is a bad artist, by any means – he successfully sidesteps some of the Image-ry by the fourth issue or so and starts expressing himself in a very blown out Howard Porter-esque fashion – it’s just that he gives the book an entirely different tone from its origin, and that seems to bleed in Steve’s writing style.  The series starts with the same sort of dark edge that Manabat’s shadow-heavy grotesqueries so well underlined, and Rebner seems to be doing his best to keep the detail level high in his best approximation of the style, but it’s simply no match: the book is too colorful, too bubbly looking, and a couple issues in he’s going full Image, with page after page of pin-ups, and some of Steve’s notes in the narration (a character whom should look like a disgusting child / adult hybrid, namely) seem completely overlooked.  Cybernary – the nympho-droid housing two personalities, out for revenge – should be a monster, but she wears a bikini; the friend she’d inadvertently betrayed, Cisco should be an abomination but is drawn with almost comic whimsy.

And so Steve begins to abandon the narration boxes which mark a lot of his writings and just moves the story forward to its conclusion.  It’s not phoned in, by any means, as it does feel like we’re following the general outline he would have had, but the dialogue and pacing feel simplified; any extra character work he was considering putting in there – and the concept certainly offered the opportunity – gets set aside for just getting the story done.

It says something, then, that the mini still comes across as a solid read.  The idea was sound, and again, Rebner has absolute skill, he just couldn’t mimic Manabat’s unique look (and admittedly did right by not trying to, as that might’ve only made things worse).  Cybernary ends up being an engaging character, and while Steve may have lost interest, he doesn’t write like an Image writer, and so the supporting cast are more well-rounded than they ought to be.  But one must of course wonder how this would’ve ended up with the original artist, and how that could’ve pushed Steve to explore some deeper concepts.