Irredeemable Volume 4

Here's another find from the going-out-of-business sale at my local Borders.

Title: Irredeemable
Issue: Volume 4
Date: September 2010
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Diego Barreto, Paul Azaceta, Emma Rios, Howard Chaykin
Colorist: Andrew Dalhouse, Matthew Wilson, Alfred Rockefeller
Letterer: Ed Dukeshire
Cover: Chriscross

This is a trade paperback collection that includes issues 13-15 of the comic series, plus the Irredeemable Special. The basic premise is that Superman (represented here by a character called the Plutonian, who is for all intents and purposes Superman) has "snapped" and gone very very bad. Bad as in entire cities destroyed, populations wiped out, and brutal murders of his fellow superbeings (who were never really in the Plutonian's league power-wise).

Alan Moore did this same story much better in Miracleman.

There. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I did find Irredeemable to be fairly entertaining. There are some likable characters, and not all of them are used as cannon fodder (some are, though). There is a pretty complex set of subplots, which serve to add a nice level of suspense to the storyline, even though they also mire the story in the cliches of the genre that it is attempting to rise above.

Thanks to the presence of the Irredeemable Special in this volume, I got a nice recap of the story, as well as some background on characters that appear in the regular issues, which helped make it easier to jump right in with Volume 4.

The artwork is generally quite good. There are a few moments of unnecessary gore (well, I'm sure they were seen as necessary to remind the reader that this is a superhero story for grownups), and there were some fight scenes where it was a bit hard to tell what was going on, but the artistic handling of a very tricky climactic sequence involving a bullet and a teleportation effect was brilliant work.

I wasn't too impressed when I first heard the premise of this, so I would have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the degree to which I found it entertaining.

Rating: 6.5/10