Review: Cyborg Vol. 2: Danger in Detroit (Rebirth) trade paperback (DC Comics)

Some of what I said when I reviewed John Semper’s first DC Rebirth Cyborg volume in 2017 remains true; I do appreciate on a structural level that Semper’s story in Cyborg Vol. 2: Danger in Detroit remains episodic, flitting from topic to topic, devoutly not written for the trade. But such a thing, while initially refreshing, can easily devolve into unfocused and meandering, and that’s how Danger feels.

There are interesting ideas in Danger, flashes of aspects that have the groundwork for strong Cyborg stories (though the hedging there is surely indicative). But Semper falls into traps that seem common among new comics writers, namely over-narrating, slang that doesn’t translate as well to the printed page, and two-bit villains present mainly to give the hero something to punch. At eight issues, Danger unfortunately drags; the amount of material supports, if there was any question, that Cyborg can hold his own series, but this book just isn’t particularly good.

[Review contains spoilers]

There have been various controversies, especially in the DC You/Rebirth Cyborg eras, as to whether, how, and so on Cyborg Vic Stone has romantic relationships. If there’s a lot that’s cliche about Danger’s first issue — the silly cyberspace realm, that indeed no sooner is a female cyborg created than of course Vic has relations with her, that then subsequently she turns out to be a bad guy that betrays him — I was taken by their meet-cute and getting to see Vic be suave for the first time in a while.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

And indeed I appreciated that Scarlett “Variant” Taylor sticks around for a while; she shows up unceremoniously in the middle of Semper’s long “Imitation of Life” and her forgettable plan for world-domination is foiled almost immediately, but at least Semper keeps her as a background figure in the “Danger in Detroit” story that follows. Perhaps Semper’s best contribution with this book is the female heroes he creates, both Variant (who could easily be used in Suicide Squad or etc.) and Black Narcissus, a Holt Industries scientist with intentional 1970s blaxsploitation overtones; it equally seems a miss that she hasn’t shown up since.

It is impressive that the kid that passes Vic by in the last chapter of Cyborg Vol. 1: Imitation of Life, Xenephon Clark, reappears as a major figure two issues later (in this book’s third chapter) without having been mentioned in between. Again, I read Imitation in 2017, so for the past seven years I assumed “Exxy” was tertiary to that scene; in fact, Semper all but makes him Vic’s sidekick. It’s too bad then that Semper tries to make Exxy sound “hip” to the point of annoyance, with such dubious slang as “I’m seriously buggin'! This whole thing is whack.” (See also when the verbiage slips, as in “I’m goin' as fast as I can” followed by “I’m a thief, not a stenographer.”) Later, when Semper portrays a rap career for Exxy, the performance is cringe-inducing.

Indeed, there’s marks of nascent comics writing throughout. Villains from Terence Fisher to Ratattack, H8-Bit, and Fyrewyre immediately introduce themselves and explain all their own powers at the start of their attacks; the heroes even comment on Fyrewyre’s demonstrative “speech,” a sure sign of trouble. The entire time that criminal Rizzo Rattama is being torturously transformed into Ratattack, he’s both screaming and also narrating how much it hurts (“The pain,” he tells us, “it’s unbearable!”). At one point Cyborg time travels six months into the future, and yet his father Silas is still strung up by the villain Anomaly in the same position he was six months earlier, the finer details seeming to have gotten away from the creative team.

As mentioned, in the midst of the DC Rebirth books when Cyborg Vol. 1 came out, it was refreshing that Semper’s book didn’t come close to wrapping up in its five issues, flaunting the six-issues-and-done pattern. But it begins to look like trouble when, at the end of the second book and issue #13, Cyborg is still at Anomaly’s mercy and Silas has been imprisoned for something like a year in comics-publication-time. I might give more credence to something like issue #11, where Semper pulls Vic out of the present action to essentially fight his way through Minecraft, if H8-Bit was a less cackling villain and the computer graphics rendered less blurry.

Still, insofar as John Semper somewhat ignores his central conceit — that Silas Stone wiped some of his son’s memories when he became Cyborg — it remains an interesting premise. Despite how hokey Cyborg Vol. 2: Danger in Detroit’s sequence with H8-Bit is, at root is the idea that Vic has friends, relationships, bad choices, and so on that he no longer remembers and is now running afoul of, and there’s plenty to make a series out of that. Equally, the giant cast around Vic — Narcissus, Exxy, Sarah Charles, Silas, Thomas Morrow, Variant, Anomaly, and so on — are rather more than Cyborg has had before; it demonstrates there’s a world that can be built around Cyborg far more than sharing the spotlight with the Titans.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.0