Irredeemable / Incorruptible Free Comic Book Day Edition

I've had trouble finding time to do reviews this week. Hope you've been enjoying the 30 Day meme. Here's a 2010 FCBD item that I picked up at this year's FCBD.

Title: Irredeemable / Incorruptible Free Comic Book Day Edition
Date: May 2010
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Peter Krause, Jean Diaz, Belardino Brabo
Colorist: Andrew Dalhouse
Letterer: Ed Dukshire
Cover: John Cassaday, Laura Martin
Editor: Matt Gagnon

Reprints the first issues of the two interconnected series Irredeemable and Incorruptible, both written by Mark Waid.

The essential story here is Superman (going by the name The Plutonian, but essentially Superman) gone bad. Plutonian kills off the masked vigilante known as the Hornet in the opening scene, along with Hornet's wife and children. From there the surviving members of the Paradigm (the superhero team that the Plutonian was a member of) are frantically scrambling to find any bit of information that might give them a chance against the seemingly unstoppable Plutonian. Waid does a pretty good job of ratcheting up the emotions and laying out the basic scenario here.

Incorruptible is the mirror-image of Irredeemable, the story of a super-villain who decided to go straight. The two stories share a setting, and the change of heart that the former villain Max Damage undergoes comes as a result of the destruction caused by the Plutonian's rampage. I liked the character of Max Damage, but the attempts at humor in the book fell flat (possibly because of the grim nature of the world and the companion book) and Damage's sidekick, the aptly name Jailbait, is a pretty good summation of everything that is bad in the treatment of female characters in mainstream comics these days. I suppose it's possible that she's been set up as a stereotype for the purpose of breaking that stereotype down later, but I was pretty unimpressed with what I saw in the character so far: dump, only interested in sex and money, and drawn in typical barely dressed comic book heroine style. Waid is trying to write a very serious deconstruction of the superhero genre here. I was hoping for better than this in such an effort.

Rating: 6/10