Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be: The Bionic Man Vs. The Bionic Woman #1 Review

As someone who was young enough to have the battery of Six Million Dollar Man toys as a kid – somewhere there exists an eight-track recording of me squealing with glee over my Maskatron Christmas gift that would earn me a scornful beating at my local dive bar – I reacted enthusiastically over the original, Kevin Smith plotted The Bionic Man series from Dynamite. As a modernization of Steve Austin’s origin story, which I still maintain is one of the classics of the sci-fi superhero genre, it was exciting and interesting while hitting all the old notes from the TV show that I loved so much as a your child.

The problems has been that you only get to tell an origin story once, unless you’re DC Comics. Since the opening arc, I’ve found that The Bionic Man has floundered by, well, trying to modernize more of the old Six Million Dollar Man story elements. Specifically, Bigfoot. Yes, there has been a lot of Bionic Bigfoot in The Bionic Man in recent months, and I’m sorry, but it’s not 1977 anymore. If you’re gonna have a Bigfoot in a story and it doesn’t pop the head off that hick in the “Gone Squatchin'” hat that I cackle at every week on The Soup, you’re missing the only opportunity that makes any sense for Bigfoot in 2013.

Because the problem endemic to any superhero story is that, eventually, that hero needs a superpowered villain to fight. And if it’s 1978 and you only have a TV-level special effects budget, sure: why not Bigfoot? He’s a gorilla suit with some wires sticking out of it. But these are comic books, with an unlimited special effects slush fund, so to force these characters to battle the bad guys whipped up by people who thought that wide polyester lapels and disco were good ideas has just left me cold.

So enter Dynamite’s The Bionic Man Vs. The Bionic Woman miniseries, where writer Keith Champagne takes the obvious choice for a superpowered antagonist and apparently embraces the old superhero comic trope of heroes fighting before joining forces… maybe. It’s too early to tell how the two characters, who never meet in the first issue, will interact, but at least there’s no arbitrary threat with bionics slapped into it for them to fight, right?

Right?

Yeah, wrong. There’s some kind of bionic-powered monster wandering around, killing one person every seven days and ripping out their hearts. So Oscar Goldman loans Steve Austin to the FBI for the manhunt, without telling the feds what kind of a guy they’ll be dealing with. In the meantime, Jaime Sommers, who in this book’s timeline is still working with OSI, is hunting down an arms dealer while working undercover as a stripper, because obviously that will simultaneously allow her to get close to the guy while allowing artist Jose Luis to draw some tits and ass. While The Bionic Woman is working the pole, Austin discovers that the monster is leaving a trackable trail of radiation, which he follows back to the monster’s hideout, where he is busily ramming his stolen hearts into his bionic chest. And then there is violence.

So the first problem with the first issue of The Bionic Man Vs. The Bionic Woman is that it does not feature any scenes of The Bionic Man versus The Bionic Woman. They are never in the same place at the same time, and there is no indication as to how the two characters are even in the same story, let alone how they will meet and, presumably, fight. This issue is pure setup of a decompressed story, that is merely placing all of the elements, with a grand total of two punches between Austin and the monster in the way of actual bionic-powered action.

But what the issue gets right is Steve Austin’s characterization, at least in terms of how he was characterized in both Martin Caidin’s original novel Cyborg and in the original couple of episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man. Steve Austin here is a coldly-driven ex-test pilot. He reacts badly at any implication that he is a machine, and he is fiercely independent when it comes to dealing with the feds on the ground, while still showing a certain amount of that old Lee Majors charm (hey: the man nailed the biggest supermodel of the 1970s. So don’t you badmouth Lee Majors here). So Champagne’s characterization of Austin feels authentic to all classic depictions of Steve Austin, and is the most encouraging part of the book.

But what didn’t work was Jaime Sommers working in a strip club, which appeared to exist only for the purposes of showing Jaime Sommers working in a strip club. This sequence is The Bionic Woman’s only appearance in this issue, and it doesn’t, in any way, connect to the main story of Austin tracking the bionic monster. The whole thing only appears to be here to make sure Sommers is in the story, and if you’re gonna do that, then hell: why not stick her in a situation where she can show off her assets to horny fanboys, amirite? Seriously, the whole sequence felt like nothing but an excuse to show a little T and A, and it really kind of bothered me. It was one thing to throw a strip club scene into a sci-fi story when I was thirteen and my Commodore 64 didn’t have a Magical Pornography Wire sticking out of the back of it. As an adult, it felt shoehorned into the book for the sake of sexing the book up. It stuck out, in a wrong way.

And then there’s the monster Austin is chasing. I don’t know what the deal is, but this is a giant monster coming from out of nowhere, that appears to be made mostly of bionic exoskeleton, and yet he’s apparently stealing hearts to stick into his chest, even though the concept of a bionic heart has been a little more than a concept since 1982. The whole thing feels like a Macguffin, existing only for purposes of bringing Steve Austin and Jamie Sommers into the same place to trade punches (and, based on the early willingness to show Jamie in her underwear, perhaps to trade Donkey Punches). It’s an impressive looking monster, but bereft of context (that will, in all likelihood, be presented in future issues), it feels slight. It seems like a simple storytelling device that will be defeated in, say, issue 3, as a step on the journey for Steve and Jamie to confront whatever the real big bad is. So I found it hard to really take the monster’s concept, or even its existence, very seriously.

Luis’s art is, bottom line, 90s style pencilling. He works in a very fine line, with a ton of facial detail crosshatching and extremely idealized figures (lets just say that, if Jamie Sommers doesn’t have a bionic spine, her buck must hurt a lot). I can see some serious influences from the big names of 90s comic art in Luis’s work; many of his faces look very much like Rob Leifeld’s (albeit without the asymmetric facial features that plague that guy’s work), with detailed, accentuated eyebrows like Liefeld and Todd McFarlane. And the bionic monster? Particularly in the early pages, it is the spit and image of McFarlane’s squat grey Hulk, down to the eyes and teeth glowing out of a silhouetted face. If you like classic 90s-style art, you are gonna find a lot to like here, but I found it more distracting than anything else; playing Spot-The-Influence means I’m disconnecting from the story.

It is really early to tell whether The Bionic Man Vs. The Bionic Woman will be a satisfying story; we are clearly in the first chapter of a plot that is meant to be read complete in a trade paperback. However, Champagne’s characterization of Austin is encouraging… but his treatment of The Bionic Woman, and the existence and motivation of what seems now to be the Big Bad, but who is destined to just be a motivator for the two to go after the monster’s creator, are less encouraging, when they’re not actually troubling. It makes me think that, yes, we will see The Bionic Woman in this story that bears her name… but given what we’ve seen of her so far, she won’t be nearly as compelling or proactive as The Bionic Man. If you’re a Steve Austin fan, be wary before picking it up, and maybe grab it with the second issue next month to see how it plays out…

…but if you do pick this issue up, remember that it could be worse. It could always have been Bigfoot in that strip club.