Metal Men #5 Review

OMAC-tivate Your Dental Plan!

Written By: Dan Didio
Art By: Shane Davis, Michelle Delecki, Jason Wright, Travis Lanham
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: February 19, 2020

The new-take on our Metal Men team continues this issue as we find out who's behind the assault on Robocon and discover what the Nth Metal Man did to Iron and Mercury.  I do hope that the Nth Metal Man mystery becomes our main focus as we continue on with this maxi-series because it feels odd just to have this Dark Multiverse, sentient Metal Man walking around Magnus' lab and no one really doing much about it beyond telling him not to touch things..... Especially when all he's doing is touching things and changing them into an unknown variable.  Let's jump into this issue and see what the Nth Metal Man's game is and find out if Lead, Tin and OMAC can save the fans of Robocon.  Let's check it out.

As we return to Robocon, we find that the team-up between Tin and Lead with OMAC is a fruitful one because once we get past the perfunctory fight between two heroes before they team up, we see our heroes handily taking care of the augmented humans, turned robotic foot soldiers of this story's big bad, Mother Machine.  If you don't recall Mother Machine, well it's not that big of a deal, she was in the New 52 Blackhawks before she wound up in the last Metal Men story in the Legends of Tomorrow series, that gave us tales of Firestorm, Metamorpho, Sugar and Spike and our titled heroes here, but the problem is, even though they point out this fact is that we're not continuing where that story left off for either our heroes or Mother Machine.  In the end, though it doesn't really matter, it just feels weird to callback to that previous title and not do anything with it.  

Throughout both our tales here, with the Nth Metal Man and Robocon, we see big changes coming to characters in the DC Universe, which may or may not excite individual readers, depending on their love for either The Metal Men or even Kevin Kho's OMAC, but for me it feels kind of big since I'm a fan of continuity and changes in status quo, not to mention ramifications to stories continuing on.  There are some big moments here, but sadly, the Nth Metal Man part still feels weird since he's given run of the Magnus' Lab and even though he's doing things he's not supposed to, it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in actually stopping him.

All in all, The art in this series continues to be some of the very best coming out of DC Comics right now and the material being drawn continues to entertain, even if I wish some aspects of the story would be handled differently or actually handled at all.  Both stories to this issue brought great cliffhangers that I can't wait to explore going forward and I'm still on the edge of my seat in discovering the secrets of the Nth Metal Man and finding out what his plans actually are..... They just really have to lock his ass up until then though because he's doing nothing to keep the mind of Doc Magnus settled at this point.

Bits and Pieces:

This is a fun addition to this series, where we continue to explore the Nth Metal Man and have a B-story dealing with Lead, Tin and OMAC as they take on the big bad of the last Metal Man story in the Legends of Tomorrow mini-series.  Are there parts that I wish could have been explored or explained more?  Yeah, but overall this continues to be a great series that I can't wait for each and every month, not to mention that it's one of the best-looking books on the market right now.

7.5/10