Stealth

The superhero known as Stealth has protected the mean streets of Detroit for decades.  Nobody knew who he was, until he came crashing home late one night and journalist Tony Barber found out that it was his retired firefighter father Daniel.  Tony’s reaction to this reveal was a kind of “surprised” that was more frightened than excited.  That’s because his father has been suffering from alzheimer’s for a while now and the symptoms have recently been getting worse.  To the point where his loss of touch with reality is starting to hurt innocent people on the streets and those closest to him.  While there’s one supervillain out there who views this as his chance to get rid of a perpetual thorn in his side, will he actually be able to take Stealth out before complications from Alzheimer’s do the hero in?

“Stealth” was co-created by Robert Kirkman and Marc Silvestri, but this volume was actually written by Mike Costa and illustrated by Nate Bellegarde.  What Costa and Bellegarde have produced here is something I wanted to like more than I actually did.  The idea of a son struggling to deal with his father’s Alzheimer’s is a familiar hook, but the superhero angle gives it some added urgency.  The relationship between Tony and Daniel is also handled well in general and Costa has some interesting ideas about how superheroism can go wrong.  Bellegarde delivers some appealing art, which has a liveliness and cleanness to it that compares favorably to the work in fellow Skybound title “Invincible.”

The problem is that Costa doesn’t dig deep enough into the ideas he brings to the table.  We’re told that Stealth is going out of control in public, but we only get a good example of that in a private context.  His idea that people will eventually turn on the heroes they follow is only given lip service.  Most bizarre is the fact that while the premise is spelled out on the back of the volume, the first issue reads like we’re not supposed to know Daniel is Stealth.  Given all this, I was surprised that the use of time-travel actually worked as well as it did to wrap things up.  It still wasn’t enough to make me think of “Stealth” as a prime example of missed potential, more than anything else.