Polite Dissent

The good news is that Doctor Spectrum has twice as much plot and action as an issue of Supreme Power. The bad news is that at least half the story has already been told there.

Travel Foreman’s art is clean and attractive; it is inked and colored well. He’s not Gary Frank, but he certainly holds his own.

The story by Samm Barnes retells the events when Corporal Joe Ledger first begins using the alien crystal. It also shows what happens when the crystal bonds to him, both physically and mentally. There is a distinct flavor of Deep Space Nine’s first episode (Emissary, for any other DS9 geeks), where Commander Sisko is trapped inside the crystal orb. Like Sisko, Ledger’s consciousness is trapped inside the crystal and confronted by his own memories and by the crystal communicating through figures from his past. This serves as an effective way of telling some of Ledger’s backstory without getting bogged down in too many momentum-destroying flashbacks.

Overall, the art was quite attractive and the story good if not ground breaking. The pace is a little slow, particularly given that most of the plot has been covered almost identically in Supreme Power. Hopefully later issues will provide the reader with more original storytelling. If you liked Supreme Power, you’ll like this. If you didn’t, then you probably won’t.

A few nitpicks:

• Ledger’s Rank of corporal has always bothered me. That’s a low rank, especially for someone of his age and someone entrusted with a top secret weapon (remember that Radar O’Reilly was a corporal). In one flashback he is referred to as “Sarge”, which suggests he held a higher rank at one point and has been demoted. Again, not behavior one commonly rewards with classified weapons. I’m optimistic that this will be explained sometime in this series.
• The medics who respond to an emergency at a classified military weapon test are civilians? This is most likely a miscue on the part of the artist, as the comments of one of the EMTs suggests that he is actually a military medic bucking for promotion. The doctor that is there, while not military, is clearly associated with the government; more evidence that the medics are supposed to be military.
• The medical scenes are good for the most part. I do quibble that the medic who is reporting the vitals is not the one taking them, and referring to a pulse of 170 as “rapid” is redundant. There is also one scene in the back of the ambulance where Ledger’s oxygen mask is hooked up to the IV bag (it’s fine the rest of the time).