Irredeemable Volume 1 Boom! Studios

2009/11/07

SAYING that Mark Waid is a great writer who knows super–heroes is just like saying the sky is blue.

Everybody knows he’s good. But Irredeemable is him taking things to the next level. Like Potter’s Field, the turns and twists of the story become impossible to spot.

The plot is simple. The Plutonian is the world’s greatest super-hero. He comes across as a good looking, sincere hero who is very good at saving the day.

Then one day, he apparently loses the plot and becomes the world’s greatest mass-murdering super–villain.

The dude just snaps and starts killing a whole lot of people. Topping his hit list are his former teammates in the super–team known as The Paradigm.

It’s a mad race for The Paradigm to stay ahead of The Plutonian as they try to a way, any way, to stop this superman gone bad. They quickly realise they know very little about their former teammate’s personal life and so the team quickly tries to piece together his secret history hoping that in his past lies the key to defeating him. As much as I love the X-Men and other big comic company properties, the very fact that this is not a creator-owned world means that you really can’t guess what’s going to happen next. Waid isn’t afraid of showing us he means business. Waid even has The Plutonian sink a particular country in our neck of the woods.

Members of The Paradigm bite the dust and the survivors, who’re getting fewer and fewer, grow more desperate.

These is a sense of dread that permeates the book that you don’t often find in super–hero comics.

The art by Peter Krause is good. He brings a classic super–hero look to the book and this makes the whole thing even more disturbing because what’s happening on the page is nothing conventional. Definitely highly recommended.

■ Comics Courtesy of The Comics Corner at www.comiccor.com