Plastic Man No More!

Eel “Plastic Man” O’Brien has always been the irreverent, carefree Id of the Justice League.  Always quick with a quip and never about to take any threat seriously.  Until the day he gets hit with a death ray and his polymeric body structure starts to slowly lose cohesion.  That’s right, Plastic Man is dying and it’s possible that what’s happening to him may also happen to his son Luke.  Unfortunately, the only possible cure involves the detonation of a nuclear device.  That’s bad, but before he was a hero, Eel was a crook and that’s the side he’s going to need to tap into if he wants to live through this.

What happens when the ultimate jokester is forced to confront his own mortality and the lengths he’s willing to go in order to keep living?  That’s what writer Christopher Cantwell is asking through this miniseries and it generally works as a grimly comic character study.  Plastic Man wants to live, and he’s even convinced himself he’s doing the right thing so his son won’t have to deal with this.  This is all well and good until the bodies start piling up and the solution is the aforementioned “detonation of a nuclear device.”  He may be a member of the Justice League, yet he’s no hero and it’s uncomfortably compelling to see the lengths to which he’ll go in order to achieve his goal.

This is helped along through some great art from Alex Lins who handles most of the present day stuff and is responsible for depicting the title character’s degeneration.  That part is handled disturbingly well as Plastic Man’s disintegration is both gross, pathetic, and more than a little sad in Lins’ hands.  The artist is also great with giving his scenes a gritty noir look to them, which contrasts great with Jacob Edgar’s scenes involving the Justice League.  Those are all sunshine and clean lines and stylishly rendered to the point where I wish we had seen more of it through this volume.

There is the fact that the slow disintegration and death of the title character will certainly not be for everyone.  It’s also possible that some people won’t appreciate Cantwell’s quirkiness (prepare for a running gag about Canasta) or what happens to several well-liked cult DC characters here.  Those things didn’t bother me too much, and I can put up with the quirks that don’t work since we also get great oddball bits like the villainous Dr. No-Face and a strikingly misanthropic take on Uranium of the Metal Men.  Overall, I’d classify this as the good kind of different superhero story and say that it’s worth reading for anyone looking for something like that – whether you decide to wait for a paperback edition of this or not.