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Airboy (Hardcover)

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    Ian Jane
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  • Airboy (Hardcover)



    Airboy (Hardcover)
    Released by: Image Comics
    Released on: April 27th, 2016.
    Written by: James Robinson
    Illustrated by: Greg Hinkle
    Purchase From Amazon

    James Robinson is talking on the phone with Image Comics Publisher Eric Stephens from the comfort of his leaky toilet about Airboy. He hates Airboy, he's tired of being 'the Golden Age Guy' and he hates the word 'reboot.' No way, it's not happening… until Stephens offers to match Robinson's DC page rate. Since Airboy is public domain and still pretty recognizable, maybe there's something here. One poop joke later and we see Robinson at a neighborhood dive bar with a drink in hand and an empty pad of paper staring him in the face.

    “Fucking Airboy.”

    He comes home drunk to his (then) wife Jann. The next morning he bitches to hear about the project, she bitches to him about waking her up and tells him to find an artist, maybe that'll help. Cut to an airport where Robinson picks up comic book illustrator Greg Hinkle. They talk about the project on the drive out of the airport and Robinson explains why he called him to collaborate with. They head to a motel, away from Jann, to get to work - but nothing happens, so they go get a drink. They bash some ideas around, and Robinson decides it'd be a good idea to go get some cocaine. Hinkle wants to work, Robinson wants to party. More coke, more bar hopping, some ecstasy and more inebriated conversations leads to… more coke, more bar hopping and more drunken high jinks and then to a heartfelt conversation about the decline of Robinson's writing career.

    Then the pick up a woman at a bar and have a three-way.

    The next (awkward and very naked) morning, James decides to finish up the leftover coke, only to find that it's brown. He realizes they were snorting heroin last night… and then someone appears to correct their inappropriate behavior.

    The second issue starts with a scene in which James Robinson Greg Hinkle, after a booze and drug addled night of pure debauchery, flee as fast as they can down the street. An unsheathed dong sways to and fro and Hinkle loses a sock. Why the panic? Because the fictional character that they've spent the last two nights trying to get an angle on has just appeared to the both of them… saying the same thing… at the same time. There goes the drug induced hallucination theory.

    As it turns out, Airboy has made the jump into their world as a kinda-sorta imaginary but not really imaginary character, and he's understandably curious as to what's going on and where he is. At first he thinks that these comic book creators are bad guys, or bad guy stooges, and then the wonders is the Nazi's he was just fighting won the war but nope, he's just alive and living through the current day. After feeding him a pot brownie our heroes take their hero off to a bar where things quickly get out of hand and as Airboy starts coming to terms with his now public domain status, well, we won't spoil the ending here. That wouldn't be cool at all.

    At first our 'heroes' figure they're tripping but nope, it's not the drugs. They see steampunk battlesuits 'like Mignola would draw' and they see Skywolf kicking Nazi ass. Airboy tells them he's going to take them to the rest of the Air Fighters but before that can happen they have to escape a Luftwaffe air strike. Which they do, otherwise the issue and the series would probably just end right there. Regardless, Robinson and Hinkle are, after this, very much aware of the dangers of combat - and the thrill it can give, sexual or otherwise - but then they arrive at their destination. Here they meet Airboy's fellow Air Fighters: Airwolf, The Flying Dutchman, The Iron Ace and The Black Angel.

    Oh, and then of course, The Valkyrie. We can't forget her. Nope, not since Dave Stevens drew her on the cover of Eclipse's Airboy #5 way back in 1986 will we ever, ever be able to forget her. That one left an impression and how. Getting back on topic… here we see the 'human dynamic' that exists between the Air Fighters. Valkyrie and Airboy fights, the rest get annoyed by it and nobody is particularly impressed with Hinkle's smell after making it out of that air strike. After his squabble with Val, Airboy shows Robinson around, showing off the hanger and yes, the morgue. Soldiers die, we're told. And in that morgue we find something rather unsettling, well not so much we as Robinson, but as we're along for the ride, we see it too.

    And then they head to the showers to clean up and… well… fuck. Didn't see that coming.

    When the last issue starts out, Robinson and Hinkle, dressed in Nazi S.S. officer uniforms, stroll through the war torn streets. They feel bad, not just because of what has recently happened, but because they feel 'fucking cool' in the uniforms. Really though, they're undercover hoping, despite not speaking German, to infiltrate the Nazi ranks hording on the other side of the bridge.

    A flashback shows us how Airboy, sick of their collective crap, basically decided that the two of them were going to do this. Call it penance if you want. the Air Fighters want the two of them to do their duty and destroy that bridge to advance that Allied cause. Before heading out, Robinson does some coke with Black Angel. She lives on the edge because she knows she could die at any time. He vents to her, about his wife, about his comic writing, about a certain 'LXG' (“What was I supposed to do, walk away from a movie starring Sean Connery?”). The best line of dialogue in the issue, if not the series, happens during t his conversation but we're not going to spoil it because you should FUCKING READ THIS SERIES. Hinkle smokes a joint and then Robinson, coked to the gills, accosts him: “Let's be comic book heroes!”

    And they're off. All they have to do is walk with the authority of proper German officers, wait for the air support that Air Fighters will provide, and then detonate the charges. Simple, right? So long as they remember to bring their U.S. Army uniforms with them to change into once everything goes BOOM. And then, in a last minute quest for redemption, Robinson does… something that we won't spoil here because it would ruin the end of the damn book.

    So very definitely 'Rated M For Mature' with this series Robinson's writing is remarkably honest. Anyone who has ever struggled to find that creative spark needed to put words to paper and deliver a story worth reading will doubtless appreciate the angle he takes here. The creator owned route that he and Hinkle take here and the freedom afforded by a publisher like Image really lets him stretch his wings and we get a story that is crass and dirty but also quite mature. The book mixes the juvenile with the introspective in a way that's honest and even touching but also a complete blast to read. Humor is put front and center here but it's quite obvious that Robinson is putting a lot of his own life right there on the page for the readers to gawk at. That takes some guts, but it's also frequently hilarious.

    Complimenting the story is Hinkle's artwork. His style nicely reflects the chaos that erupts once he and Robinson embark on their journey of debauchery, with a great double page spread highlighting the haze that the pair finds themselves in. There's plenty of exaggerated moments in here that'll keep you laughing but there's also loads of great technique on display. Appropriately cartoonish in spots but never lacking in fine detail. To summarize, this is a great looking comic book.

    On top of all that we get a neat look at how Hinkle, based on Robinson's specific idea, put together the cover art for the upcoming second issue of the series (a crazy piece featuring forty-one characters that compliments the cover of the first issue really nicely).

    One thing to note, however, is how the second issue is reprinted in this hardcover collection. Some may remember that there's a scene where, while Airboy is off in the bathroom at the bar, Robinson talks to Hinkle about quitting DC and why and it's here that we realize there's more to this issue than just blowjob jokes and drug fueled rampages, but it went in an unexpected direction from there. This bar scene… it did stir up some controversy, which has since been addressed and addressed fairly - it was in bad taste, but then, this entire comic is (to a certain extent) an exercise in bad taste. We'll leave it up to others to debate but in the context of the story, where two characters (they being Robinson and Hinkle) are at rock bottom as depicted here, it doesn't seem so far out of line to think that a pair of assholes would act and talk like a pair of assholes. Much ado about nothing? Well, apparently not because it's been altered and softened for this reprint - the edits are very minor, changes were made to two lines of dialogue, but they were made and that should be noted. Now, Robinson and Hinkle own the material and are quite rightly entitled to edit this work as they see fit -it is their work, after all. And it was clear from the way in which Robinson addressed the issue at the time that he regretted how it was originally written. The event in question still occurs, but the dialogue has been changed to make it less offensive to members of the LBGT community however, it doesn't really change the humor of the scene much at all. Some will see this as the right thing to do, some will see it as revisionist history but you'd think this would at least be addressed in the afterword. It is not. Having said that, it seems obvious to this writer why Robinson chose to change those lines.

    Aside from that, however, this is a great package. It includes the aforementioned afterword, a simple one page piece by Robinson, but it also has eight pages or so of sketches and conceptual early pieces from Hinkle that show his creative process at work. The book as a whole is dirty and it's crass and it's funny but it's also quite poignant. Airboy succeeds as a darkly humorous but surprisingly honest look at the ways in which people mask their own personal pain and deal with the pressures of their professional life - which might not sound like a fun book to read, but it is. In fact it turned out to be one of the best reads of 2015.






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