You know what’s great? When comic books tell great stories. You know what sucks? When comic book tell crappy stories. Especially stories that are so rife with clichés that it becomes hard to turn the pages. Stories that are dull, predictable and trying so hard to be “edgy” that they forget to be good. If you’ve never experienced the latter, might I suggest One Hit Wonder, one of the stupidest books I’ve read in recent months?
So, what’s this masterpiece in mediocrity all about. Dig this! A child star, who has been screwed by a horrible upbringing and driven crazy by his loss of fame, becomes a hitman. Whoa! Wacky. But no, no, it’s not done yet. One Hit Wonder (get it? It’s a play on both the kid star aspect AND the hitman angle. So clever!) opens with our main character, who is so beneath enjoyable I have no idea what his name is, spilling his guts out to a TV shrink. At the end of his speech, he kills the shrink. Why? Because he wants to be famous again, even if it’s a famous hit man.
Our main character is craaazy. Know how we can tell? His eyes are always open really big, he has a smug grin, and he doesn’t give a fuck about anything. This guy could be the star of One Hit Wonder or he could be any villain in any action movie. To make sure we know how edgy both the character and the book is, writer Fabrice Sapolsky gives us a scene with two naked women at our hitman’s house, which is actually Neverland, Michael Jackson’s old estate, because the hitman is so crazy he just decided to live there. Oh, the hilarity. Stop. I can’t take anymore clever writing.
I’ll bet you can guess what comes next. Yep, you’re right. Our hitman is given a job to chase down a beautiful target who outsmarts him at every turn and has barbed one liners to back her up. At one point, the hitman manages to escape a whole bunch of FBI agents by firing rockets at them. How did he do it? Well, the only explanation we get is the hitman as a child star talking to a special effects guy. There’s no dialogue, just a shot of the conversation, which is supposed to leave us to believe that he can now build rockets.
The end of One Hit Wonder doesn’t matter because none of the rest of the book matters. This is like something Sapolsky mined from Quentin Tarantino’s dumpster. The art is terrible as well. Ariel Olivetti has a style that seems taken right from a dentist’s office wall-art. No expression, nothing interesting, just panel after panel of easy characters and dull action. I’m not sure who at Image Comics approved this garbage, but lets hope their job is up for review soon.
