I do have to thank The Uniques for giving me my favorite comics panel of the week. Look, maybe it's not a mistake. Maybe the stomp-victim's name is actually Sonfua and Ponytail Wheelman is overcome with emotion at his friend's plight! I bet Sonfua gets that all the time!
Had a chance to flip through issue #2 of The Uniques, which takes a Godlike premise and veers straight into four-color terrain set in 1996. After reading The Uniques #1 via free download from uniquescomic.com, I'm still not sold on the comic (now up to issue #7). It's an independent labor of love from Comfort Love and Adam Withers and the art is fine, if not quite top-tier, but the book itself doesn't grab me. And when the script for at least the first 60-odd pages saddles just about every black-looking character who speaks--briefly--with stereotyped mad ebonics yo 'sup boy word for realzz dialogue? Yeah, it's painful.
Despite The Uniques's self-made origins and its lengthy, unintentionally goofy alternate history detailed on the website--during the Vietnam War, "teenagers .... were assigned to combat units without sufficient training if they possessed a useful ability such as the capacity to glow in the dark"--it looks and acts like a wannabe mainstream superhero comic. Sure, it's a world where supers were used as tools and weapons from WWII up through Vietnam and the Cold War, but that angle is smoothed over as much as possible so The Uniques can get back to generic superhero antics. Whatever, backstory; overpowered teenagers face-kicking random thugs in dark alleys and basement lairs is Serious Business. Call it the convergent evolution of the genre, a phenomenon by no means unique to Love and Withers: no matter how elaborate a superhero comic's backstory or setting, the end result is almost always precision-engineered so that people (preferably young white people) with spandexy outfits can play out all the usual tropes.
The Uniques' central cast (young, overwhelmingly white, frequently spandexy) even has dazzlingly generic codenames: Scout, Telepath, Quake, etc. Their predecessors did them one better with codenames straight off an RPG character sheet: Virtue (who really should've been called Uncle Voltron), Speed, Celerity, Mentor, Kinetic. (Love and Withers previously did RPG illustration work and, indeed, the cover to The Uniques #1 doesn't resemble a comic so much as a player's guide.) The names feel flat even for the government-run superhuman "Uniques"--Countryman is the best moniker this world has for its Captain America? (Russia has the similarly inspiring... Comrade.) Imagine all the downcast military and intelligence officials who at least would've thrown words like "Eagle," "Flag," "Freedom," and "Thunder" into a hat to come up with a veritable redwhitebluegasm. The Pentagon must be crying, Uniques-verse. Crying.
On the plus side, you can amuse yourself all day by wondering what other Uniques might be out there: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Charisma, Comeliness, Height, Weight, Birthplace, Class, Demeanor, Skills, Feats... Dominate, Obfuscation, Presence... the possibilities are endless, at least until you run out of rulebooks. (If I became a Uniques-verse superhero, my codename would be either be Four Dots In Guns or Player's Name: _____.)
According to Love and Withers, their intention was to create a comic "about character first instead of big plotlines," "real, normal people who talk like real, normal people." Interestingly, character and dialogue are among the the weaker elements of the book; the leads are more like types with dialog than individuals, with a habit of neatly info-dumping their feelings and motivations at each other. The reader is always being told, not shown.
Another downer: the first read-through of The Uniques #1 immediately revealed sloppy errors such as a seemingly misplaced word balloon, "I want to be there when she arrives Motherboard," and "Your welcome" instead of "You're welcome." Uniquescomic.com suffers from an even higher rate of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors; for starters, nothing jacks a knife into the back of the comic's would-be alternative timeline like repeated references to "the 27th ammendment" of the U.S. Constitution. The mistakes are good for laughs, at least; take Michael, the Icarus-with-immunity-powers-and-alien-guns character, raised in the Appellation Mountains.
The long and the short of it is, in a field stacked with competing superhero titles, The Uniques isn't genuinely horrible, merely bland and unpolished. Still, Love and Withers aren't devoid of artistic talent; if they stick to pictures, not words, they should do all right in the end.
