Broken Frontier

Ah, high school—fertile garden of teen coming-of-age stories blended with a healthy dose of super powers and fantastic stories for the good people at Marvel. Lately your local comic shop has been swelling with the comic book equivalent of buckshot from Marvel Comics—new series after new series introducing young characters hoping to spark with a new generation of comic readers that might eventually lead to new "legacy" characters with the staying power of Spidey, the X-Everything, and the rest.

With the exception of last year’s Runaways, most of these series seem destined to go or have already gone the way of a failed television pilot. In many cases, it’s not that the ideas were flawed. Often it was somewhere in the execution. Thankfully, Marc Sumerak and Mike Hawthorne seem to have finally gotten most of it right with Machine Teen.

The premise is simple: Adam Aaronson is an all-around amazing kid. After transferring to his high school, he’s promptly become the local football hero, snagged the pretty cheerleader as his squeeze, and still found time to ace all of his classes. This kind of inhuman behavior coupled with some recent seizures has led some people in the school to suspect that Adam might have a secret, probably of a chemical nature if you catch my drift. They’re wrong of course. Adam’s secret is far stranger and so secret he doesn’t even know about it: he’s a robot.

Machine Teen is a simple story, but it’s a well-executed one. In a glut of hyper-detailed over-Photoshopped comics, Mike Hawthorne’s uncluttered cartoonish style matched with Mike Atiyeh’s straight color schemes might seem a little amateurish or primitive at first blush, but the simplicity works for the story. The stylistic approach is not without its problems, however. It’s clear that Machine Teen hearkens for a Powers-esque feel, but the color palette is too broad here to be as effective as it is in that book. Design-wise, there are times when a little more detail might help the story to really leap from the page. When the secret lab belonging to Adam’s father is revealed, it’s kind of shocking to see how bare-bones and three-decades ago the lab equipment is compared to the incredibly complex machine that is Adam. A couple of consoles, a desk chair, and some cabinets are all you need to build a robot?

Still, what Machine Teen does well is balance the ordinary with the fantastic. The best of Marvel’s old stories did not re-invent the wheel or so far remove the characters from the normality they might share with readers that it became impossible to identify with what the characters were going through. On the surface, Adam Aaronson’s going through the same kind of things all any overachiever might be experiencing. Beneath the surface, well, there are gears and shiny metal things.

Sumerak has a nice flair for the dramatic. There are some unneeded attempts at post-modernism (Adam wears a Spider-Man t-shirt for most of the first issue) and the book’s title could have been a little more artful and a little less on-the-nose, but his writing is sound. The story is well-paced and the plotting and characterization shows a little bit of depth. It’s no opus, mind you, but these days when a writer pays more than lip service to a supporting character that isn’t an annoyingly cloying code name or ridiculous fetish, it goes in the "win" column.

Machine Teen is by no means the next Spider-Man Marvel has been hoping for. But it’s perhaps unfair to expect phenomenon in a very first issue. The fact that it doesn’t totally crash and burn on takeoff is a hopeful sign. A large part of its destiny will be shaped by coming issues. Now that the premise has been deftly revealed, it’s up to Sumerak and his team to craft a through-line that will pay off the hook with some originality, some style, and (fingers crossed) some fun.

-Jesse Vigil