DESTROYER!

I don’t know if you’re like me, but I love me some stories by Robert Kirkman.  His creativity and general love for comics shows in just about everything that he writes, and his style of story-telling fits perfectly for guys like me in their 20’s who’ve been reading comic books since they were children, but don’t want to read a children’s comic.  He manages to blend character cliché’s from over 50 years of Marvel and DC comics and turns them on their heads, giving them interestingly realistic opinions and motivations that seem like they were obviously simple to the characters but never explored.  Add in buckets of blood and guts, and brutal fights where as the reader I even feel bad for the villains, and what you get is comic book greatness.

I just got done reading Robert’s Marvel Max series Destroyer, a five part miniseries produced in 2010.  If you’re unfamiliar with Marvel Max, its Marvel’s adult line of comics where literally anything goes.  Often times, the Max series exists within the Marvel Universe with already established characters as their protagonists, but Destroyer is set in a world all by itself using a character that has been in comics sparingly since the early days.  The character the Destroyer was a character who appeared in Marvel comics in the 1940’s as a much younger super hero.  Robert Kirkman took that character and wrote a story as if he’s been aging since the 40’s.  Here’s the pitch: Marlow is an old man with a bad ticker, and his number is up any day now.  Despite the doctor’s warnings, this old war horse has decided that he needs to tie up some loose ends before he dies.  After a lifetime of trying to never kill the villains in his rouge gallery, he’s decided at the end of his life that he must put an end to these psychos once and for all, because leaving them to wreck havoc on the world after he’s gone would be simply irresponsible.  As he swabs a bloody path through his enemies, his old rivals start to reappear to attack his family before he can execute them.  Will Marlow survive long enough to save his wife and daughter?

The story is drawn by Robert’s original Invincible artist Cory Walker, who does the best work I’ve ever seen come from him in Destroyer. Honestly, I thought his early work on Invincible was just so-so, but with Destroyer he’s become one of my favorite artists out there.  The comic is colored by the extremely talented Val Staples, and lettered by VC’s Rus Wooton.

Destroyer is a story that short and sweet and covered in blood.  The character designs are really well done, from the giant monsters to the everyday thug-for-hire.  As it is with Invincible they seem to poke fun at already established Marvel and DC icons, while remaining serious enough to carry an engaging story.  I could read another three volumes of Destroyer, but unfortunately it was kept to a small story focused on the retirement of an old hero, and maybe its better that way.  If you’re interested in reading this graphic novel, you can find it at Amazon here for 11 bucks: http://www.amazon.com/Destroyer-Robert-Kirkman/dp/B005M4JAAK/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1344283444&sr=8-15&keywords=destroyer+marvel.