Crazy Food Truck by Rokurou Ogaki

A surprising amount was overlap with both Creative Burnout regular Heart Gear and personal favourite Soara of the House of Monsters. Like Soara it is bombastic and fantastical on household topic.  Like Heart Gear it is a road trip of two people (one knowledgeable human and the other a dumb superhuman) across an arid wasteland in the search of meaning. But Crazy Food Truck unfortunately lacks the panache to stand out. 

Baring a few action scenes and comedy beats the series never commits to anything. The cooking elements are extremely limited, both in the recipes presented and barely touching on the joy of  a good meal. The food truck drifting across the wastelands looking for customers never serves clients or aids them through the culinary arts. Arisa might enjoy Gordon’s meals as her drives his new mysterious and powerful partner around. But they never extend it to anyone else.

Problems are resolved exclusively through the main duo’s capacity for violence. And attempts to find hidden depths to them fall victim to either the author’s indecisiveness or haggard pacing. Faults that becomes incredible obvious the more you read and realise that Gordon’s flashback stories to his military past highlight the four people who shaped his current life as a cook very conspicuously stop talking about the fourth person because that was too much to handle. Arisa taking her shirt off is not enough to distract you from how Gordon’s past and the wider cast is actually becoming less detailed as it is explored further. Without any special quality of its own Crazy Food Truck unfortunately becomes a bland and unsatisfactory experiment that highlights how others have achieved far more with the same ingredients. Avoid.

Heart Gear Volume 4 by Tsuyoshi Takaki

Completely surrendering to his monomania, General Wodan throws out all subterfuge and resolves to just crush his problems in a big robot.  With an insane general rampaging the responsibility of stopping him and ending his Valhalla falls to: a human girl, her robot protector, a living camera and an opposing commander with seriously bruised special shock-absorption padding.  

The first half of Volume 4, Born to Lose, is the conclusion to the Valhalla arc. It unfortunately suffered due to real-world circumstances. Takaki was seriously ill during this period so it is not surprising that the ultimate showdown with Wodan is underwhelming. Especially compared to Chrome’s pervious fight with Hildr. While perfectly understandable why this would be the case it is still a disappointment.  Especially as Wodan’s total abandonment of subtlety removes his only interesting traits in favour of just being a loud obstacle for our heroes, one that refuses to muster up the creativity to say anything entertaining as he fights. 

Takaki’s health issues also explain why afterwards the series slows down to softly reset before moving into a new arc. During this acclimatisation period Takaki’s discussions of artificial life focus less on abstract ideas and instead focuses on the possibility for humans to transcend the limits of health to become lifeforms able to pursue their ambitions forever.  The section feels a lot more personal and more keenly thought out than other debates in the series. 

This new arc introduces Heaven Land figures R and D (haha) who reveal they have split opinions on the 12-year old Roue, as the last human could reshape or destroy their community. Leading both of them to make her future a game: R deploys her Elephant Unit to kill Roue while D mobilises his Donkey Squad to escort her as an honoured guest.  

Regretfully the weakest volume of Heart Gear so far but still containing promise.  Both with a new suite of characters and with the author finally being able to articulate his bigger ideals as more than set dressing for action scenes.  Still featuring the author’s stylistic flourishes that make the journey interesting to look at; Heart Gear is hovering around the point where it will lose me but still has not convinced me to do so. 

Bloodstrike: Brutalists (2018) by Michel Fiffe

Super-powered operatives Cabbot Stone, Fourplay, Deadlock, Shogun and Tag have all fallen in the line of duty.  Project Born Again has found a way to resurrect them as part of a government assassination program. Born Again seeks to run covert missions using dead men.  Defeat can mean death but never an escape.  Bloodstrike agents are condemned to eternal resurrection until their value is completely exhausted and the unseen power brokers order their charred bones will be cast aside for the next unfortunates.  Through a haze distorted memories and mounting contempt persisting into the next life, Bloodstrike won’t accept their rotten luck for much longer.

Much like his self-published series COPRA homages with John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad, Fiffe’s work on Brutalists has an undeniable and enviable passion for the project. He is enjoying himself immensely for this opportunity to contribute to this forgotten series with new stories. Bloodstirke originally ran between 1993 and 1995 as a spinoff book to the first ever Image Comics series Youngblood by Rob Liefeld. As with all early Image comics it is born out of some of the most popular Marvel Comics artists growing dissatisfied with the bosses they were making rich to go build their own publisher and handle their own books. Youngblood as Liefeld’s vision of a high-profile team of government-sanctioned superheroes who enjoyed all the glitz and glamour that came with superstardom. Bloodstirke was the grittier and meaner spinoff book about the operatives hidden in the shadows and deprived of everything. Everything except the mission.