Damage Control #1: A Piece of Cake

If you are looking for a book about the gritty underside of shiny superheroics and saving the world this…might not be the book for you. This is a madcap, maddening, sight-gag-dependent slurry of the worst part of internships, office jobs, and the perils of failing upward. It’s an absolute joy to read, provided you haven’t had too much coffee beforehand.

This issue is composed of two very different, similarly bonkers, stories. In the first (aptly titled ‘Into The Mailstrom’) Adam Goldberg and Hans Rodionoff drop readers into the first day of a new office worker as he is given the seemingly inglorious task of saving the world via memo-and-ice-cream delivery. Every superhero advertised on the cover shows up to either hinder, help, or be blithely insulted by our…I hesitate to use the word ‘hero’….our stress-eating protagonist as he works his way through a series of tasks which would be simple if so much weren’t riding on it. The total effect of this section resembles nothing so much as my toddler’s brain after he eats a family sized bag of Skittles. 

Will Robson packs every panel with gags, glimpses, cameos, and an almost terrifying level of detail. The book would have been considerably less fun without his contributions.

The second section had a much more cartoonish tone, and that’s saying something since the first story was very The Office meets Adult Swim. Charlotte Fullerton McDuffie invented the world’s most intrusive mother and then pitted her against Thanos. Can an overbearing mother’s love defeat a giant purple guy hellbent on world domination? Of course. Can she do it without transforming into an equally giant slime-monster? Who the hell knows. But it was fun finding out. 

Jay Fosgitt’s art was what you’d get if you stuffed Scottie Young in a blender with whoever designed Cow and Chicken and hit puree. It’s perfect for the story it was telling, but I have a feeling that too much of it would be the neurological equivalent of being beaten about the head by a large gold brick wrapped around a small slice of lemon. 

Ruth Redmond colored both sections and her work deserves mention all on its own. She did a difficult job with a virtuosic level of finesse, illuminating two very different styles absolutely perfectly. I’m excited to follow her career.

This was an explosive start to what promises to be a fun little mini — assuming none of these idiots manages to blow up the world before issue two comes out.