Gearhead Review

Title: Gearhead

Arthur: Dennis Hopeless

Artist: Kevin Mellon/Ed Herrera

Publisher: Arcana

Binding: Paperback

Release Date: 2008

I discovered the comic Gearhead on comixology as a free preview and was immediately drawn in. The comic gave off the impression of a Mad Max post apocalyptic style world and centers around Shelby Cooper, the tomboyish protagonist who knows her way around a wrench. We meet Cooper for the first time participating in underground drag races for rent money. She stays calm and cool beside her 1940’s hot rod while her next victim boast about his new all electric Datsun 440Z, (guess Nissan decided to go retro with their marketing), before pulling up beside him at the starting line. Knowing that victory was in the bag, she blows the doors off the newb and in good sportsmanship style, supplies the young lad with a witty t-shirt that announces his shame for all to see. With the money in hand, Coop heads on home stroking her ego about how great she is until her car stalls on the empty highway knocking her down a peg. The preview pretty much ended there leaving me eager to see more. I went ahead and purchased the trade of the four issues where I quickly learned that Gearhead’s story flat out died along with Cooper’s fuel pump.

The Cover of Gearhead is simple showing the protagonist staring at the reader while rocking a tank top along with welding gear and a giant wrench in hand against a white backdrop. Colors are muddy which one could say fits the messy life of someone who works with machines for a living, but to me it just comes off resembling uninspired watercolors.

Inside the book, coloring gets a little bit better with more defined shadowing adding depth to the panels, but the bland colors still plague the world the reader is immersed in. Elements are at times poorly represented with odd color choices as well. There are multiple panels where fire is depicted as green smoke, making the scenes difficult to interpret until the lead character makes it clear of that fact later on.

Character designs span from the extremely dull and forgettable to outright ridiculous. Captain Weather Vain’s all green spandex suit is without a doubt the blandest outfit I’ve seen in comics so far. Red skull, the chief of police looks like a rejected version of Marcus Felix from Gears of War and totes around a large revolver that anyone with the simplest knowledge of firearm mechanics would see there’s no way it would work. Subtle T, the ultimate villain in this story wears an outfit so ridiculous and outlandish that it instantly kills the whole premises of Gearheads fabled society but I’ll get into that later. Cooper is the only character that shows any effort put in. Mostly because she’s drawn in the sexiest positions possible Heck, her chest at times is the main focus on multiple panels. Breasts are nice, but there are better ways of making a female character sexy without making every panel a pin up.

Anatomy and facial issues occur through out the story as well. Arms become too long, heads aren’t connected to necks correctly, and derp faces are everywhere. Most of the time though characters just have a bored, unconcerned look to them, even when they are fighting for their lives. Even when they should be flat out pissed they just show a squinty look of annoyance.

Gearhead was a first time comic project for artist Kevin Mellon and it really shows when he tried to illustrate movement and physics. Characters flying look like they are standing giants, while an action as simple as a slap looks like someone holding their hand out. Cars can be seen jumping over folks for the simple sake of showing action with no ramp object anywhere to be seen and Coop has no problem flying a jet pack with a belly shirt and thong with the exhaust flame right over her back. How the heat alone wouldn’t burn her ass, I don’t know.

The use of the panels and the dialog bubbles do an a overall pretty good job at telling the story as the sequential art is easy to navigate, and bubbles never get in the way and are easy to understand who is saying them; with the exception of one splash page where readers witness Cooper being captured by Weather Vain. Unconscious, and flung over the shoulder of her enemy, this would normally be a tense scene except in the very next panel, we see Cooper and her friends driving away in her vehicle acknowledging their escape. Even in a flash back we see Weather vain beating up Coops friends with her nowhere in sight. Why didn’t Weather Vain fly off after grabbing her? Better yet did he ever have her? Did he put her down? The reader doesn’t see Cooper till a few panels later where she is awake and rescuing her friends. Furthermore, since the flashback was all from her memory its safe to say that she was always awake making that splash page completely meaningless.

Despite my problems with the art portion of this comic it’s the story that really kills this book. Gearhead was also a debut project for writer Dennis Hopeless and boy was this a rough start. After the opening race, Cooper is in her garage and calls her brother, owner of an auto parts store, to get a new fuel pump. Living outside the city in the barren apocalyptic wastelands, she goes to meet her brother where we learn an interesting bit about life in the city. Strict laws are apparently in effect inside city limits. Smoking, drinking, porn, profanity, and combustion engine vehicles have all been outlawed within jurisdiction limits leaving everywhere else outside the fifteen great cities a sin filled utopia in a matter of speaking. She arrives at her brother’s store only to discover that he is gone and left a message for her to check the safe. From there, she discovers an mp3 player and plays it to hear their deceased fathers favorite song and begins to cry, trying to make the reader feel sorry for a character they saw. The song then turns to her brother’s voice telling here that her father was in fact a fighter in the super war and that bad things are coming for them. This is where the story takes a complete U turn. The story started out as a road warrior’s tale and quickly turns into a Watchmen type scenario. Turns out the apocalypse was the result of an all out war between super heroes and villains leaving most of the United States in shambles. The moment is interrupted when two suits walk up to the shop and attempt to set it a blaze using super powers with Coop still inside but fail as she escaped.

Realizing that he brother was captured, she goes out in search for info on her father’s killer and stumbles across a small bar named Bar of the Dead. Inside, a band of ex-super villains sit and watch TV as zombies walk around the joint doing chores. Why are zombies doing chores and tending bar you ask? Well much later in the story it is finally explained that one of the ex-villains, Teddy, can generate multiple flesh and blood zombie clones out of his body. He doesn’t possess souls; he’s not a necromancer, he just really emo and lets his, “dead inside” feelings take shape in the real world. Sound silly you say? How about another character that can shoot waves of oil out of his hands? Why Exxon never made the man a billionaire is beyond me.

Taking out the working zombies, Cooper never questions why the dead are walking, and barges into the tavern where she is quickly apprehended by the occupants. She learns that  her captives knew her father and decides to listen to their tale while randomly wearing only a t-shirt and panties despite uttering moments earlier that she would never get naked due to the horniness of one of the occupants. It is revealed that even though her father fought for good, he was eventually murdered by Subtle T and her crew of ex superheroes. Subtle T is now the president of the United States and apparently destroyed all dress codes as she works in an outfit shaped like the letter “T” covering only her naughty bits. That’s my biggest gripe with this character. How you going to outlaw porn and swearing when your outfit screams sex and would cause every straight male to emote, “god damn” within sight? I understand the outfit was to reflect irony with her name but it’s impossible for me to believe that a society this fixed on morals would allow their leader to walk around like that. It’s also impossible for me to believe that her second in command walks everywhere with giant headphones over his ears at all times. Not like he has anything important to hear being in the white house and all.

So later on the group of bandits let Cooper go and find themselves under attack from Red Skull and Captain Weather Vain after Subtle T learns of Cooper’s existence and orders her out of the picture. Some of the bandits get killed, causing the survivors to make a stand and attack Subtle T’s minions head on. Arriving at the police station, Teddy generates an army of zombies and equips them with guns they acquired along the way. Shortly after wiping the police force out, Oil Slick forces Red Skull out and begins to beat him senseless while Cooper tries to pry him off. The struggle continues as Coop tries to save Oil Slick from committing murder, until he finally lets up. Red Skull, now defenseless and beaten so bad that he can’t move or form words, Cooper then takes her giant wrench and in one clean swoop, smashes his face in, making that whole  struggle to save his life absolutely pointless. It is from there the book raps up with Subtle T showing her goods to the world as she gazes out of the windows of the White House with a mildly annoyed expression asking simply, “what’s next”.

In the end Gearhead is one mess of a comic with an identity crisis. It starts out as a post apocalyptic road warrior’s tale that jumps ship to become some half assed superhero drama. The characters and art are way too dull, and the story has way too many hiccups and contradictions to keep readers entertained. It also shoehorns in the popular zombie element and instead shows that zombies being used as a super power just don’t work in this kind of story.  I went into this book expecting to discover a unique bad ass female protagonist who wasn’t afraid to do a man’s job and instead got an uninteresting character that had no business going beyond the pin up posters she was created from. The creators of this crapfest have gone on to making other comics such as X-Men: season one, (Hopeless) and Hack/Slash, (Mellon) so one can hope that their skills greatly improved over the years. With that said though, avoid this lemon at all costs.

Ryan Pierce