3 out of 5

Ah, 90s Image.  Doth your modern day version look back in shame upon your blood-splashed covers, veiny, impossibly muscled men, and books that were billed as art over writing?

But some good things happened.  Or rather, there was some definite talent there, just maybe funneled through some questionable avenues.  Dale Keown – while fully slotting in to the typical Image style at the time – was one of those talents, with a confidence to his art that, like McFarlane, made it his own thang, despite being a drop in the bucket of over-sized hero drawers.  And Pitt, as far as I can tell, was a bit better conceived than Spawn, which was pretty much just “dude from Hell; with chains.”  Pitt is “alien dude; with chains,” but then there’s a weird connection he has with a young kid, which makes this a weird descendant of Omega the Unknown.  …So is that why Steve Gerber makes a scripting appearance here?  It’s a long shot, but Steve’s appearance otherwise feels completely random, although I do think you can pick out his internal monologue style (especially on issue #10, where he only scripted a few pages).  Regardless, the story and script don’t stink of indulgence like a lot of then-era Image books.  Keown might’ve wanted to just draw his own version of The Hulk, but at least it seemed like he came up with something more than a cookie cutter origin to justify that drawing.  (Okay, maybe only slightly more, but I didn’t mind reading it.)

We’re at the tail end of other things happening in these two issues, which mostly focus on the fallout of something something battle and how it’s affecting that young kid (hint: it has screwed him up).

I do actually like Keown’s art, trying to look past the Spawnyness, especially in issue 9 when Billy Tan and Mark Farmer ink it in a very confident manner that sets it into more of the Sam Kieth territory.  Issue 10’s Dan Panosian inks, though, are very light and Image-y, making the book look more like the norm.

So in terms of Gerberness, this is collector’s only stuff here, since we’re not even looking at an isolated story.  For Pitt fans… I got nothin’, this being the only Pitt I’ve read.  But you got me – I’d definitely read more if it stumbled cheaply my way.