Tankers
Oil in the world of “Tankers” is eventually going to run out – just like real life! But don’t worry, the CEO of Greenleaf Oil has a plan. He’s had the greatest scientific minds working on a plan to time travel back to when the meteor struck Earth and killed all the dinosaurs, and just give it a little nudge so that it won’t come back and hit the planet for another 50 million years. That’s another few thousand millenia of dead dinosaurs to swell the supply of oil on our planet! With the power of science and the most dangerous roughnecks in the most badass exo-power-armor around nothing – and I mean NOTHING – is going to stand in their way!!!
Well, so long as the nerds don’t get the math wrong…
It’s a plot that’s as schlocky as they come and writer Robert Venditti and artist Juan Jose Ryp play it up for all that it’s worth. There’s nothing subtle about “Tankers,” and that’s part of its charm. You’re here to see a bunch of swole dudes and one dude-ette blow away dinosaurs in the Cretaceous and then struggle to fight back against super-evolved murdersaurs in the present. (WHOOPS – SPOILERS!) It’s utterly ridiculous but it moves quickly, looks good, and you’re likely to enjoy this if you’re capable of shutting your brain off while you’re reading it.
The thing is, there were two big things that kept me from fully doing that. One was related to the story which took it past dumb and right into stupid. That would be the premise of delaying the comet’s impact by 50 million years to swell the reserves of oil, with the impression that Goldleaf would benefit from it in the present day. The problem is that no attempt is made at all to address the fact that pushing the rule of mammals back by 50 million years will create a substantially different present and that took me right out of the story from the start.
The other is a technical issue that I hope publisher Bad Idea works on for future collections of its miniseries. “Tankers” is printed on a non-glossy, light gray newsprint stock and while that didn’t present an issue with enjoying David Lapham’s art in “The Ends,” it doesn’t do Ryp’s work here any favors. His highly textured work comes off as incredibly washed out on this paper, and that never stops being a disappointment while you’re looking at it.
Bad Idea is new to the collected editions business, so we’ll see if they learn from their mistakes here. I do want to say that I liked the extra material included in the reprint of the “zero” issue here. Specifically the five-page short from Filippo Bertozzo, a Doctor of Paleontology, and artist Lewis Larosa whose silent tale of dinosaur suffering has more emotional resonance than the main story could dream of. There’s also a brief afterword from Venditti where he acknowledges that the story wasn’t like what he usually writes, but he decided to take a chance and noted that it has led to bigger and better things with the publisher. Good for him (and I’ll have some thoughts on “Hank Howard Pizza Detective” eventually) even if it’s really not hard to see how they could be better after this.