TITLE: Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether
STORYTELLERS: Greg Rucka and Rick Burchette
PUBLISHER: webcomic (self published)
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2011-2012
PAGE COUNT : approximately 100 screens (series to date at the time of review)

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT WRITING / STORYTELLING :
1.  A bunch of pirates get in an old fashioned 1700s style ship and travel through space, real world physics be damned! It shouts “This is fantasy” from the very beginning.  It’s a fantasy world unlike most I recall seeing.

2.  There’s genre mashup: it’s a bit wild west, a bit steampunk, and a bit of a pirate/  Horatio Hornblower sort of thing. This shows when you create a fantasy world you can include elements of different things from different periods and cultures.

3.  I liked the splash showing the cast of characters with a question mark for the mystery villain called “The Smoke”:

4.  There’s a mysterious mcguffin (a mysterious locked box that only a key can open, it’s sealed with a magic spell).  You just go along with it and don’t think “Oh This is a McGuffin!”

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING
1.  The team does a webcomic that sometimes has two screens on a page instead of one, allowing for a sort of vertical double page splash.

2.  I liked how the final splash panel of this scene is a long shot with the characters walking away after killing the bad guys.  You see the chaos around them:

I guess splashes are not just for big shots of people hitting things!

RECOMMENDATION: B

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS:
This is definitely different from what Greg Rucka usually writes.  He says he wanted to do a “fun” series, and it mostly works, though Lady Sabre’s cheeriness while killing people is a bit odd.  Not that a swashbuckler can’t be cheerful, but she seems to take it to an extreme level- some more neutral moments or more of a range of emotional reactions to a situation might be nice. I could relate more to the grim sheriff character.

Storytellers: Written by Dwaine McDuffie, art by Denis Cowan and JJ Birch
Publisher: Milestone and DC Comic
Year of Publication: originally published 1992-1993
Page Count: 8 issues

What I learned about Writing/Storytelling:
1.  I guess this book demonstrates the basic idea of a story arc. Hardware is something of a jerk when first we meet him. By the end of volume, he is guilty about this and trying to reform himself.
2.  This book starts out with an extended metaphor about a parakeet and a glass window.  (Probably a famous scene among Milestone fans).

This establishes early on that the book is ABOUT something.
3.  McDuffie uses a low page and panel count. He seems to stick generally to five panels a page with no more than 25 words per panel. This means the book is a page turner and very readable. 

What I learned about art/storytelling:
1.  The art didn’t do much for me, but one thing I noted was they played around with the visuals a bit during some dream sequences, where they had a number of faces superimposed behind Hardware.

Recommendation: C+

Notes/Reviews/Synopsis:
Based on that opening page, I take it the book is supposed to thematically be about “glass ceilings”. Wikipedia defines glass ceiling as “the unseen, yet unbreachable barrier that keeps minorities and women from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements.^“

It occurs to me that this is not exactly great material for a superhero series. There’s probably a reason that the villains in X-men build hunter killer drones to exterminate all mutants, rather than sitting around an office failing to promote mutants from lower manager positions to middle manager positions.  It’s maybe kind of hard to relate to a guy who’s biggest problem is “I’m rich, but not as rich as I should be!”

In this story, Hardware is the most valuable employee of a technology firm. He’s rich, but not rich enough, because he doesn’t get a share of royalties on his inventions.  He asks for royalties, and is turned down, because his boss is a jerk. 

So, Hardware digs into his boss’s background, hoping to blackmail him into giving him royalties, and it turns out his boss is some sort of criminal mastermind, sort of like the kingpin but less larger than life and competent.  So, conveniently, Hardware has an excuse for seeking revenge on his jerk boss.  Hardware builds a suit of armor and starts nuking his boss’s operations, while also maintaining his secret identity as a mild mannered employee of the technology firm.

His platonic friend eventually learns his story and tell him he’s a jerk:

The platonic friend is very one-note, she’s just there to tell Hardware he’s a jerk.
This book just never transcends the superhero tropes. There’s the Iron Man Sort of guy, the jerk boss Norman Osborn/ businessman Luther sort of guy, later on, there’s a multi part story where McDuffie has Hardware fight a Punisher pastiche, and sure there’ a twist on Marvel’s “The Punisher” but I’m like really, who cares?

 
Another problem with the book is there’s little sense Hardware is in any real danger. It’s as if you had a comic based around Iron-man fighting The Kingpin.  Iron-man  is too powerful: he could just fly over and nuke Kingpin, there’s no real competition.McDuffie co-created Icon and Static around the same time he created Hardware, and my sense is that both are better books with far more relatable characters.