FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics vol. 2 — Wish You Were Here

The first volume of “FBP” wound up being a comic that I wanted to like.  This second one pretty much misses the mark.  As the latest round of cutbacks hit the organization, Adam, Rosa, and Cicero head up to Nakeet, Alaska, to assist in the shutting down of research facility.  Said facility happens to be run by an old friend of Cicero’s who happens to have created her own “quantum can opener” to explore the nature of reality.  However, the actual “shutting down” of the facility is relegated to playing a small but critical role in the story as Adam and Rosa work out their own personal issues during their downtime.  He’s getting some traction on finding out about the person who may be behind his dad’s disappearance, and she has to deal with the fact that this isn’t her home dimension.  Their problems wind up coming back to haunt them in Nakeet, as Adam’s show up with guns and “shoot to kill” orders, while Rosa may have just found the solution to hers.  Meanwhile, Cicero has to deal with how his former guy friend is now a girl and the difficulty in keeping Adam and Rosa’s reality supplied with diesel.

Reading this story, it felt like the wrong time to dive into a six-issue arc where the characters expound about and confront their problems.  Better to keep building this world in bite-sized chunks while setting up things for the long game of an ongoing series.  I’m left feeling this because “Wish You Were Here” felt like a directionless slog for a good portion of its length.  Lots of talking without a lot of purpose behind it will sap even the best series of its momentum, to say nothing of one like this that’s still trying to find its footing.  You’ve also got the fact that the nature of the reality being explored by Adam and Rosa isn’t explained that well, with both being treated as valid even though we know that there’s only one that really matters.  The two agents also seem unaware of this fact even though it’s something they signed up for.  What we get in this volume does little to convince me that this series will find its groove anytime soon, or before it comes to a premature end due to low sales of its single issues.