Customer Reviews

24Seven (v. 1)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Imagine if Nick Hornsby, George Romero, Ray Bradbury, Candace Bushnell, Bret Easton Ellis and Isaac Asimov were having a potluck dinner at Ed McBain's house (McBain brought the appetizer) and began to contemplate a city filled with robots. No people, just a bunch of happy and sad, overworked but loved, hopeful and despondent, logical and insane robots. Stephen King then drops in late, (he brought desert) and joins in the already engaging chat. A couple of over-filled wine glasses later the talk would begin to get juicy.

24seven is like that - "juicy."

An anthology of loosely connected (largely by theme) stories finely written and drawn by some of the best comic book writers and artists currently working today, 24seven is a book to read and peer at repeatedly. It's one of those books you have on your night stand that once finished can be enjoyed over and again by discovering details not noticed at first glance.

It would have been easy to merely make the stories sardonic throughout (there are a few, thankfully...one needs hefty doses of sardonic at times) but some of the stories are, well they are actually sweet. A dude-bot finds his future love at a bar while enjoying a night out with his pals, while in another story a Carrie Bradshaw-like fembot retreats to a butterfly exhibit to merely enjoy nature's power of renewal.

But it's not all butterflies and unexpected sexy babe-bot smooches. Robofiremen answer the call to root out robot bad guys on the lam, ala "Fahrenheit 451" and a depressed husbandbot succumbs to the voices in his head, literally, in a final tale of robotic psychosis.

It might be easy to say that the use of robots instead of people is a gimmick. If it is a gimmick, more of a "hook" actually, then it is a gimmick that works and is utilized quite well. They are not mere mirrors of our own selves. The robots are like us, but they are different. Sometimes they are very different and it is in these differences, perhaps that the mirror is brought into analogous focus.

The stories are short, well crafted and the art is an absolute delight. Highly recommended.

It's pretty much what it says it is. It's fairly entertaining. I haven't read any of the other NYCMech books from Image, but I'd bet they're along a similar vein.

My only real gripe is that for the most part all of the robots in the stories are pretty much just people that look slike robots. They act and do things exactly like any robot would with the occasional robot-thing that sets them apart. It's a good comentary on human behavior, I suppose. The art is entertaining as well.

This volume is a collection of cyber punk short graphic novels. Anything recomended by Warren Ellis is got to be good.

This book, as an anthology of short sci-fi/noir comics, bored me. As I read through story after story I was hoping to come to the one which would redeem this book for me, but I never did. Some of the stories are slightly interesting, but none of them deal with the premise well enough to be interesting for what they are. The theme seems to be that each story takes place in New York City, if it were populated by robots, and these are the ground rules. Each writer has an idea that would be ok by itself, but the robot angle is just forced, and leaves me feeling a little irritated.

The art was pretty decent, however. Some of the visuals were impressive. In particular, I was impressed by Paul Lau.