Rating: WARTY!
I felt disappointed in this from the start. This was an advance review copy, but it felt so unfinished that it was like reading a rough draft or a spec script. I can't speak for the print version because I saw this in e-form, so may be that the real thing is better-printed, but Dustin Nguyen's art in this format truly sucked. The colors were washed out in many images, as though CMYK coloring had been employed and one or two of the colors were missing! Some of the drawing looked like rough story-boarding from a movie set rather than comic book imagery - as though the frame had been penciled in quickly, with the intention of cleaning it up afterwards, but then it had been forgotten about and never finished.
The images are smaller on an iPad or other such tablets (and not a mini, a full sized pad) than in a printed comic, which often makes the text hard to read at best and illegible at worst. Both were present here. My advice to comic book publishers is that if you're not going to specifically tailor your book to the electronic format, then don't publish it in that format at all. It does you no favors to compromise between two different media, and it's even worse to design for one medium, and then try to promote it in the other. It doesn't work, and I despair that publishers, especially graphic novel publishers and creators, are never going to actually grasp this.
These problems were all apparent in the first two pages, before the story ever got going. When it did get going it was a sorry disappointment - a pastiche of movie and TV show clichés and tropes that offer no originality. If you missed season three of Star Trek: Enterprise, then you can pretty much catch up here: there's a variety of aliens working together, including insectoid and humanoid (and also one species mentioned which has become extinct), the unprovoked attack from a mystery spacecraft, the quest to find out where the craft originated before it's too late.
There's a huge dose of the movie AI; there's a juvenile Iron man who is all robot; there's a lackluster KAF ("Kick Ass Female") straight from central casting. There's a mechanical Hulk in the form of a drill-bot which has way too many smarts for a real drill-bot, but not enough to make an interesting character. There is an evil species which is , naturally, super-sized and all teeth. There is ridiculous unabridged cruelty and savagery in a supposedly civilized federation of planets. None of it came together to make any sense, let alone an engaging story.
The supposed story is of a robot designed to emulate a ten-year-old boy and be companion to such a child, which begs the question as to why it's armed with a deadly Iron Man style palm energy beam, which only made 'sense' in Iron Man because he needed the energy to fly. The kid robot has your stereotypical sci-fi alphanumeric name: TIM-21. The story here is that Tim has similar programming to the giant space bot which wrought havoc on the planets, but since one of the nine planets in the federation was already laid waste, the programming doesn't seem too smart in that this planet was also attacked! I could not get into this at all. it offered me nothing, and I can't recommend it.
