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Title:
FBP Federal Bureau of Physics Vol One
Author:
Simon Oliver
Publisher:
Warner Bros (DC Comics)
Rating:
WORTHY!
Art work: Robbi Rodriguez.
Colors: Rico Renzi.
Letters: Steve Wands.
I can see why DC comics wouldn't want a reviewer like me reading a comic like this. I have a decent physics education and I paid attention! The physics is asinine, a smattering of reality combined with a bunch of complete nonsense. That said, the story wasn't too bad, so with a caveat for the science education, I recommend this one, especially since the two main characters are not the usual white folks. One is evidently of Indian (that is, from India, not native American), and the other is Hispanic, so kudos for that. Additionally, there are interesting female characters, too, so kudos for that, as well.
The premise underlying this series is that the laws of physics have somehow developed a few holes, and weird crap starts going down apparently randomly - like a so-called Bubble universe appearing, or a so-called quantum tornado carrying off the father of one of the main characters when he was a kid, of course. His partner - the one who joins him later in the story, also has a weird history.
The suggestion is that there are some people manipulating things, perhaps causing these weird physics outbreaks in order to profit from it. The FBP is a government agency, but during the course of the story, we see it largely disbanded and the responsibility put into the private sector. To me this was nonsensical, but this is the USA, where capitalism rules, so who knows? It could happen. It was hard to see how the private sector would profit from this, but in the end, we learn that there's a boom in selling physics insurance, so maybe, unlikely as it seems, that's what's going on. It's not clear, and it's certainly not a very good motive, so maybe there's more to be discovered down the road.
One big problem I had with this is that the writer doesn't really have a very good grasp of physics, so he takes half an idea from reality, and then lards it up with woo, and off he goes. If you can ignore that, the story isn't too bad at all. I had to swallow hard to get down some of this, though, because it stuck firmly in my craw. There were small oddities - like one of these guys carried a beeper - in a comic written in 2013! That seemed anachronistic at best.
And there were some really big holes, like this one guy saying that the universe began a billion years ago - which would have been almost five billion years after the Earth itself was formed! No, try fourteen billion years for the age of the universe and you'll be much closer.
Another one of these holes was gravity. Yes, it's a weak force, but it can act over long distances. What the writer doesn't seem to get is that because it's very weak, you need a lot of mass to really feel the effects of gravity at the macro level. You yourself are a center of gravity. You pull on the Earth. The problem is that you're so insubstantial in comparison with the Earth that Earth hardly feels it!
That's why even if everyone on Earth got together on one side of the planet and jumped all at the same time, it wouldn't have any appreciable effect on Earth's spin or orbit. You need a bunch of mass before it’s really noticeable: something the size of a moon or a planet. This is also why creating a micro-black hole in a science lab isn't going to swallow Earth - the black hole has to have sufficient mass before it can do that, and an artificially created hole in a lab isn't going to have anywhere near sufficient mass to affect anything any more than you yourself have the mass to affect anything.
There were many minor annoyances fortunately confined to the first few pages, like one character or another would come out with some high-faluting name for something, and then immediately give the initials for it - initials which were never used again, so what was the point? And there were very large annoyances like a dozen or so pages in (there are no page numbers) when a character says "...will reach singularity and collapse." No, the singularity is the end point of a catastrophic collapse. It's not the starting point!
Flashbacks were frequent and rather poorly-integrated in some instances. It was very easy to miss where the flashback ended and present time started again, but that said, they weren't quite as irritating as some flashbacks are. They did (and briefly, thank goodness!) contribute to the story, so they were not too bad.
In one or two instances, the lettering quality is poor. For example, one description runs like this: "A Standard metal-jacketed round fired? from a colt .45". I don't know what was with the question mark after 'fired' other than poor editing, but these were rare, so again, not a killer problem.
There are two instances where we're told the dark matter content of the universe. At one point it's 75% and shortly thereafter another character tells us it's 80%. The fact is that (according to Wikipedia) the universe consists of roughly 5% ordinary matter, 27% dark matter, and 68% dark energy, so no, most of the universe isn't dark matter, it's dark energy. The parts of the universe we can see make up the tiny minority of what's actually out there.
My problem with wikipedia's figures is that it leaves no room for regular energy (energy light?!). Obviously that exists, and I find it hard to believe that it's negligible. Maybe they include it in the regular matter. After all, when you get right down to it, matter is really nothing more than 'frozen' energy, if I can put it that way.
The writer screwed up badly in describing the 1971 Hafele-Keating time dilation experiment. Not all of the clocks gained time. Only the ones which were flown eastward gained; the ones which were flown westward lost time. The experiment did serve to confirm Einstein's theory of relativity though, but it wasn't the first or the only confirmation we've had since he first began putting out these ideas in 1905.
So, I had a lot of issues with this, but in the end, the comic proved what I've long been saying in my reviews: you can get away with a heck of a lot with me if you give me an interesting story and some cool characters, and in the end, this comic did deliver on that, so I'm glad I also took volume two out of the library! I'll be reviewing that today, too.
The art work is cool and appealing, the coloring is wonderful. The lettering continues to be a bit too small for ebook form. I love the way it was put together and I especially appreciate the way the artist uses the full page. No wasted tress here! I recommend this series based on volume one.
