Cyborg #11 Review and *SPOILERS*

Digital Nightmare

Written By: John Semper Jr.
Art By: Will Conrad, Tom Derenick, Tony Kordos, Ivan Nunes, Guy Major, Rob Leigh
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: April 5, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Cyborg's hit its new monthly schedule and with that a price hike to piss everyone off.  Really though, if this series were better, I don't think that it becoming a dollar more an issue would be all that bad, but since we're still dealing with the same story since the series began, it really feels like the nails on the coffin lid for this series.  In the previous issue, we saw Exxy and the new superhero of Detroit, "Black Narcissus" help our hero with his malware problem, but it seems that Anomaly went and got himself some friends too in the form of Rizzo Rattama, who with the technology provided from him by Anomaly went and became the Lord of the Rats............. but seriously, with a name like Rizzo Rattama, who didn't see that job title coming to old Rizzo?  So yeah, Cyborg's being engulfed by an army of rats controlled by a crazy eyed drug dealer, let's jump into this issue and see what's what.



Explain It!:

So yeah, you know how we've been dealing with Anomaly as our big bad since this series began, but because of constant derailments from the story that make us deal with something else or just stuff that's added to an already bloated story has kept us from actually moving on and getting something new?........... Well, I hope you know because we're now at issue #11 and we're being derailed again because instead of finding out what's going down with Exxy and Black Narcissus and maybe coming up with a plan to save Variant and Dr. Stone and finally taking down Anomaly, instead we have ourselves a little video game adventure which is just nonsense.  We begin this issue with Cyborg being overrun by rats and complaining that they're tearing all of his flesh apart............ which really, I guess he just means his face because that's the only bit of flesh left on his body, but he counters this by opening a boom tube beneath him, sending himself and the rats into the blackness of space..........which Cyborg somehow survives himself........ and that's where the book really stops making a lick of sense.

Yeah, it seems that Cyborg, with his head full of Anomaly's virus isn't able to pinpoint where he wants to go with a boom tube and when he opens one of to try and get back to Detroit, he somehow sees a red version of himself that tries to kill him, but then he quickly takes care of before entering an 8-bit world............ that we find out from a flashback is a world that him and a friend of his named Keiji Otari created ten years ago when they designed a game together called Perilandria.......... Yeah, this shit is actually happening.  Anyway, it seems that on top of blocking out the memory of becoming Cyborg and the weeks that came before it, Dr. Stone also blocked out the time that Vic gave access codes for Star Labs to Keiji so that they could upload their game as a virus to the Lab's servers, which then Keiji being a hacker who needed money then used to steal data from the Red Room and sell its secrets on the Dark Web, landing his ass in juvenile hall, where he used a Game Boy to create a 8-bit world that he entered becoming H8-Bit.  So yeah, H8-Bit thinks that Cyborg abandoned him and then forgot about him so obviously he wants our hero dead and after boom tubing to Detroit and then back to the video game world, Vic remembers a glitch in the game that caused it to crash, which he then immediately exploits.

In the end, H8-Bit begins to disappear and lets us in on the fact that Keiji actually died in juvenile hall and that H8-Bit was only a program that Keiji created, but none of it matters because Cyborg boom tubes home because out of nowhere he's getting good at it again and I'm left wondering what the hell I read and how the hell a boom tube could take somebody into a computer program........... fucking nonsense....... especially since this little video game jaunt kept us from getting back to our actual story.

That's it for this issue of Cyborg and where I thought the price hike and becoming a monthly title would kill this book, I now realize that telling stories like this one is the thing that will eventually bury it into the ground because I have no idea who would want to read this.  The story made no sense, interrupted our current story for no real reason and introduced a character from Cyborg's past, who doesn't matter at all.  It's like John Semper Jr. is writing this series without taking his ADD medication because I don't know if he even knows what this series is about anymore while he keeps getting distracted by something he sees somewhere and just throws in all willy nilly.  It's just nonsense and the only thing from keeping this book from being a steaming pile of crap is the art team, who do a pretty fantastic job in making something that doesn't make sense look good.  I really don't like this book and after reading this issue, I wish this series would just end.

Bits and Pieces:

Goddamn does this issue do its damnedest to keep us from the actual story by giving us twenty pages of nonsense that doesn't mean anything at the end and is ludicrous even in concept.  There is nothing going on in this series anymore and the only saving grace is the art team and while it doesn't deserve the score I'm giving it in the eyes of most people reading this review, the Get Fresh Crew will know exactly what I'm talking about.

5/10