NYC Mech Volume 2: Beta Love [Paperback]

Ivan Brandon (Author), Miles Gunter (Author), Andy MacDonald (Illustrator)

Book Description

Series: NYC Mech | Publication Date: December 7, 2007

Quentin's every day bus route gets hijacked at gunpoint by a woman aching to show him a little romance - even if it kills them. This modern noir roller coaster ride rockets through sci-fi NYC populated by robots. Welcome to NYC Mech.

Editorial Reviews

Review

So? Imagine every living thing in New York City, from the birds and the rats to the people, are robots. The story is very cool urban drama, about a bus driver named Quentin who meets a wild and crazy girl who completely messes up his life and he starts to fall in love with her. The robots act, talk and fill all the same strata of society that people do and could easily have been done without the robot angle, but that would have been a lot less fun somehow. This is the sort of thing that should appeal to fans of Demo or Teenagers from Mars. And the book looks absolutely spectacular, with some of the best coloring (from Nick Filardi) and reproduction on the stands. --Variety

This is the coolest book on the planet. Sure, not the best book, not the perfect book, but without a doubt the coolest book. It would be interesting to see, panel-for-panel, this series redone with humans instead of robots. I can't imagine the series being nearly as disarming or mesmerizing with that sort of normalcy. Strange that a mechanical world invites more intimacy from the reader than one with organic organisms. This issue has much more plot than the first three, but it's going somewhere interesting and very unexpected. --IGN.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Image Comics; 2 edition (December 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582408890
• ISBN-13: 978-1582408897
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,115,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Beta off not bothering, July 3, 2011

By 

Sam Quixote - See all my reviews

This review is from: NYC Mech Volume 2: Beta Love (Paperback)

A bus driver with a fightin' past has his world turned upside down when a female assassin hijacks his bus all to get his attentions. As the two begin their relationship, he realises she is doing terrible things for the two of them to live the life they want - will he stand up to her or go along with it? Oh yeah and everyone and everything in this world is a robot.

And that's where the book falls down for me. Everyone's a robot but they behave exactly like humans. They eat, they sleep, they wear clothes, they have sex, they have exactly the same moral codes, the same culture, that humans have. So it's effectively unimaginative and uncreative, the only difference is the superficial change of having the characters be made of metal instead of flesh.

I couldn't get past the pointless anachronism to really embrace this book. While the story tries to be exciting, it never really becomes that. The female assassin is the generic female assassin you've seen in The Matrix or Black Widow or Catwoman or literally dozens of other more interesting characters. The bus driver is so dull you don't care about him or the choices he faces, you just wish something interesting happens - and it doesn't.

For a book trying so hard to be cool and chic it comes off as neither and instead fails to even be an interesting oddity as any chances of originality the writers/artists might have infused into the world are completely ignored. Not an essential read by any stretch, it's no wonder NYC Mech has all but disappeared in the scant 4 years since it arrived.