O.M.A.C.

Do you know who Jack Kirby is? Do you like when 20 pages and $2.99 are devoted to slavish devotion to his style, at the expense of telling a compelling story or establishing characters you can give a shit about? If you answered yes to those questions, O.M.A.C. is the comic for you. It's about a scientist or researcher or programmer that gets turned into a giant blue superpowered robot or cyborg or Robocop or something. He smashes shit for 19 pages. The last page is a reference to Infinite Crisis, a 2005 DC Comics miniseries that I'm gonna go ahead and say most of the mythological new readers DC is trying to recruit didn't read.

The creative team is "writer" Dan Didio and artist Keith Giffen. Didio, author of such hit titles as "the last few issues of Superboy before the book got canceled" and "the last few issues of Outsiders before the book got canceled" is also a higher-up at DC/Time Warner. Art was courtesy of Keith Giffen, a well-respected artist and writer (and one of the few creators in the industry who manages to pull double-duty and not totally suck at one or the other), who should have known better than to get involved here. Giffen's in total Kirby-homage mode, and while he does a capable job here, it's in service of nothing. Total fail.

Will I be buying the next issue: Hell to the nah.

Would a new reader be able to pick up this book and understand it: See above.