Kinetic

What an awful cover, tho. It's a very interesting story with a unique lead character. It gets double plus thumbs up from me.

When DC comics lauched their "Focus" line the basic concept was that in a normal everyday world what would happen to someone who gained super-powers? It's not an original idea, it's just a ploy to escape the complex continuity of the established superheor universe. DC launched four titles, including Hard Time by Steve Gerber and this book Kinetic. Kelley Puckett is a writer who's very skilled at building up a story. For his other work check out the first few collections of Batgirl. Unfortunately, with an experimental book like this for a big company like DC, if the book doesn't do well immediately, it gets cancelled pretty quickly. Puckett's storytelling is masterful. The first page of the story is Tom, the main character, sitting on a toilet reading a comic. He's holding it with his left hand. He puts the comic down on his knees to wipe his nose on the back of his hand, then keeps reading. His right arm hangs at his side the entire time. The scene seems odd, but it's hard to tell exactly why. We find out that Tom suffers from a number of diseases including hemophelia and monomyelic amyotrophy, the latter being a degenerative nerve disease and because of it Tom is unable to move his right arm. Tom hates his life, he feels humiliated by the fact that he has to be dependent upon his mother for his medication, is angry at everyone who calls him a gimp. Building the story, Tom's powers don't even show up in the first issue. After sneaking out in the middle of the night, Tom is hit by a truck. Tom doesn't budge. The truck however has a nice sized dent, and the driver flies out the windshield. In shock Tom walks home. The next day he thinks it was only a dream. Soon he finds that it wasn't a dream, that he is strong and invulnerable. His diseases go away and his arm begins to function. But he doesn't put on spandex and go out saving lives. Nor does he start robbing banks. He simply enjoys being healthy. But at the same time the anger that was bubbling below the surface when he was sick also begins to come out. Tom's mother finds out about his abilities and is forced to deal with the fact that for the first time in seventeen years, her son doesn't need her. Like the Publisher's Weekly review says, the ending is a bit abrupt. I suspect this is because the series only lasted eight issues, and so what Puckett was building had to end quickly. The artwork by Warren Pleece is good, if a little bland. His figures are average sized instead of the usual superhero fare. Tom himself is understandably very thin. The artwork is simple, a little cartoony, but the storytelling is excellent. The panels with no dialogue, of which there are many, read quite clearly. You can tell what emotions the characters are experiencing and you can tell why. I personally hated the color. Everything is tonal values of cyan, magenta or gray. Think Dan Clowes' Ghost World, for something comparable. There are no natural flesh tones, an