Bankshot

Marcus King was a mercenary who took on despots around the world and took their money when he could.  Then an operation in Africa went all kinds of bad and left him paralyzed and wanted by the CIA and FBI.  It wasn’t all bad, though.  Afterwards he met this great girl, Soraya, and her Russian scientist friend Rem.  He had a way for Marcus to walk again, but it wound up doing more than that.  These days he’s a nanotech-empowered warrior who only takes on the jobs he wants to.  Which is why he’s taking on a job from the Russian government to take out the man who paralyzed him who is maybe also holding the man who saved him.  It’s the kind of job Marcus lives for, even if it turns out to be one big trap for him in the process.

“Bankshot” comes to us from writer Alex De Campi and artist Chriscross and promised quality genre action and thrills.  While the story has swagger from the start thanks to De Campi’s punchy dialogue and Chriscross’s detailed art, it really does take a while to get going.  You’d think that revealing to your audience that the story’s protagonist is empowered by nanotech would be a priority, or something staged as a major reveal, but that’s not the case here.  As such, the story doesn’t settle into its revenge-action groove until it’s around halfway through.  “Bankshot” does deliver the goods in the end, but it also left me feeling that it wasted a lot of its potential getting to that point.