Deathblow: 2 out of 5

Cybernary: 3 out of 5

Trying to puzzle out Steve’s brief involvement with 90s Image is definitely weird.  Even though the company was certainly able to lure in big names for guest spots – I mean, we’ll assume that the head Image honchos had made their friends, and certainly the pitch was meant to be very creator friendly – that Steve only pops up on a very small number of titles, and is credited for script over story, feels like an odd match for the one-time creative powerhouse.  Sure, he did his stint doing tons of fill-ins in the 70s, but that was because Gerby was the plug-in people figured could fix a flagging book, and generally with his appearances he’d either kick off some new ideas or effectively close out a whole slew of loose ends.  His Image books don’t feel that way.

So: while Jim Lee and Brandon Choi are credited with Cybernary’s creation, I have to believe that the story design was Steve, run through the approval of the whoevers running the Image ship.  This doesn’t place the process too far outside of the Marvel / DC range; perhaps it’s just how much the publisher pushed, during that era, the creations of their artists, since their names were the draw.

Anyhow, we ended up with the curious venture of Deathblow and The Cybernary, which had a high profile Jim Lee character pumped up on the cover sharing half its pages – this was not a backup, it was a split book – with Cybernary.  In the wiki article on the character, it’s quoted that Steve didn’t feel that the artist who took over for the proper mini-series following these appearances represented the vibe of the book.  I can comment on that more when I finish that mini, but a glance at Nick Manabat’s Heavy Metal-esque (that is to say: Bisley-esque) art makes it easy to believe that.  Heavily inked, excessively detailed, manic pages with wires and gobbledygook hanging off of everyone, it fits with the Image muscleman look, but it’s still a world of difference.  Image looked “cool,” Cybernary looked “dirty.”  And so our short introduction to a ‘nympho-droid’ who’s gone rogue and nigh blows herself up while running from some ‘hunter-killer’ pursuers – falling into the experimental clutches of an underground group of ‘techno-dwarves’ – feels like a 70s mature readers pulp mag you’ve found stuffed in the back of your dad’s closet.  The brief series is very much in set-up mode, with the dwarves discovering two personalities stuffed into the droid’s brain – the last issue of the series giving us a little more info on one of those – and so it’s hard to really warm up to it, or exactly thirst for more, but it is undoubtedly different from the grunting, angsty blow ’em up scripts of the majority of Image books of the era.

…Like Deathblow, the script for which is utter crap.  The first issue attempts to give us a “layered” look at the “emotions” fueling special ops guys Deathblow, struggling with the lives he’s taken but – in a true moment of high school poetry – lamenting that he’s too weak to take his own life.  The amount of ellipses used between words in this issue exceeds the amount used in most novels.  The remaining four issues bounce between DB’s shoot-first-guilt-later deepness and some plot about a leather-clad vampire (because of course) being awoken after a bamillion years and wanting to destroy the world.  And guns!!  This is essentially the template for the writing style of Gears of War, which is to say it’s just a transcribed capture of what someone was probably saying after stepping in some dog poo.  So why two stars?  Well, murder me for supporting Image’s excesses, but: the art.  Lee does a killer (purposeful) update of Frank Miller for two issues, and Tim Sale (?) steps in for issues three and four, delivering some similarly amazing layouts, particularly in the vamp’s awakening in issue 3.  It’s tough to admit it, given that this era birthed so much nonsense, but there were some very talented dudes working on these books.  We just maybe didn’t like that they all seemed to love drawing waify big-boobed ladies and Olympia sized men, both with pointless pouches and chains wrapped around their extremities.

For Gerber followers, Cybernary is important, and thus her first appearance here – although maybe not grabbing on its own – is an important component to own in addition.