Death’s Head #1-4: No Upgrade Required

I am a sucker for continuity. How a writer plays with it goes a long way in forming my opinion. Death’s Head is a character with a long rich history, including both time with Transformers and hunting Doctor Who. Wiccan is a character whose history I use to baffle and confuse people as an example on how convoluted comics can get. Tini Howard writes this miniseries in a way that acknowledges and continues the stories of this characters without bogging us down in their complicated pasts.

Kei Zama does incredible art on this book. Her experience creating ‘bots is clear. Everything from Vee’s sleek model to the room sized enemy and all the background robots in between look amazing. The colors by Felipe Sobreiro set the tone the story needs, vibrant but not without some grit.

The story itself is fun. Death’s Head is repurposed into an amp. Wiccan stores deactivated robots in his box spring. Hawkeye awkwardly climbs on Death’s head to monologue and defeat a giant evil robot with a computer screen for a face. The story is also deep. Death’s Head is struggling with being outdated and irrelevant. He constantly needs to come against newer models capable of things he didn’t even realize was possible. Meanwhile Wiccan is struggling with similar fears of antiquity, he refers to the Avengers as the “real Avengers”, invalidating his time with them, and how heroes younger than him have become members. The duality is tied neatly together with how endearing and consistent each character is.

The only issue I could find with the entire run was the ending. While I have been a fan of the Wiccan/Hulking relationship, Howard unpacks and reveals some pretty significant issues between the two. Wiccan’s insecurities and ambition of relevance. Hulking worries about his fiancé’s disregard for the laws of reality. The issues are never fully addressed, instead they have a brief three panel moment that skirts the issue. While realistic, and about as much as I should expect from a four-issue mini that wasn’t even about them it left me…unsatisfied.