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This is unfairly hilarious.

Agent Black: I’ve resolved to do a marathon this year.

Agent Orange: A marathon? That‘s your New Year’s Resolution?

Agent Black: Yeah. And what are you doing? Remember, resisting the feminine wiles of Alberta the Florida Gator doesn’t count.

Agent Orange: My resolution wallops your mammalian marathon and makes it cower in the corner. I’m applying to college!

Agent Black: Do you have a high school degree?

Agent Orange: Nope.

Agent Black: Or a GED?

Agent Orange: …that’s why I’m applying to college.

Agent Black: No, a GED is… never mind. You’re hopeless. I don’t suppose you’ve taken the SAT yet?

Agent Orange: Squad Assault Training?

Agent Black: Never mind. So, uhh… what does your admissions strategy look like?

Agent Orange: Affirmative action.

Agent Black: …

Agent Black: …

Agent Black: I don’t think many schools offer affirmative action for reptiles, mutated or otherwise.

Agent Orange: No, you dummy! Everyone knows that alligators are inherently awesome. If I were stupid enough to mark the species box, they’d penalize me to make humans feel more adequate.

Agent Black: I don’t think there’s a species box. I guess you’d just mark ‘Other’ in the race box.

Agent Orange: I spit on your ‘Other’ box! Everybody knows that it is a dark plot against reptiles and I’ve already established that I am inherently awesome rather than stupid. Instead, I wrote ‘NOT’ next to every race but Aleut/Eskimo to throw them off my tail.

Agent Black: Why Eskimos?

Agent Orange: I reasoned that anyone that lives among the succulent and juicy caribou is assuredly among the Chosen Ones of the Gator Gods, even though they are technically closer to Canada than Florida.

Agent Black: …

Agent Black: …I don’t think that… never mind. So you didn’t check anything in the racial box. You can’t get affirmative action unless you check off some underprivileged boxes.

Agent Orange: Florida offers public housing preferences.

Agent Black: You’ve lived in public housing?

Agent Orange: Sure. I spent twenty years a few blocks away from the worst slums of Washington, DC. During my stay, four of my land-lords were shot, two fatally.

Agent Black: Sweet Christ, that sounds horrific.

Agent Black: …

Agent Black: …

Agent Black: Did you just claim that the White House’s security quarters counted as “public housing?”

Agent Orange: I’m a shoo-in!

I read The Last Man today, which made a biomask look pretty good with a hooded jacket. It’s a vaguely sci-fi story with some weird bits of fantasy mixed in. The premise is that the removal of an artifact from Lebanon triggers a curse causing every male on Earth to spontaneously suffer a death-by-eye-gushing. The only surviving man apparently survives because he has some magical trinket.

The character development was pretty flimsy. The male lead is a slightly more reckless but physically tricky version of Peter Parker. The female lead is a Secret Service agent– Agent 523, I think. (Naming a character after a number is painfully cliché)… I’ve seen reviews that praise TLM for this agent being innovative because she’s one of a very few strong black-female characters, but taking an extremely cliché governmental archetype (The KillBot) and making him a black woman doesn’t seem very fresh to me.

Most of the story has taken place in Washington so far. That is usually a cliché setting– second only to NYC, I think– but I’d excuse that because using government figures like the Secret Service pretty much requires Washington. Occasionally, the story took completely random tangents to Israel, which raised red flags about oncoming political sermons. However, in hindsight, Israel kind of makes sense as a setting because Israel’s women play an unusually important role in its national military. The story will probably make more use of the Israeli characters later, but right now it feels like characterization a la Heroes (keep throwing characters at us until someone sticks).

I enjoyed the writing, but tellingly I can’t remember any lines. By contrast, I remember five separate punchlines from The Hood, a comic I read three years ago. (One memorable scene: “You’d make a good FBI agent, Tommy. Do you want to be an FBI agent, like your uncle Carl?” “F*** that! I wanna be an Avenger”).

The villains were a major drawback. In this comic, we saw a neo-Amazonian cult and a gang of Republican widows that storm the White House with shotguns to take the Congressional seats formerly held by their husbands. (I’m not making that up. However, I should point out that the story has actually felt pretty even-handed when it makes political allusions.) The archvillain, the Amazonian leader, is wholly forgettable. The only thing I remember about her is that she once beat Bobby Fischer in chess.

The action has been pretty restrained so far. Frankly, I think that’s one of TLM’s strengths. I think it might help if the writing were as restrained. For example, the surviving women turn the Washington Monument into a memorial for the dead men. Because, you know, it’s phallic-shaped? Haha! Yeah. It was that bad.

The world-building has been moderately disappointing. There was one hilarious scene with a model whose job ended when all the guys died. But besides that, TLM has hardly ventured beyond the generic sci-fi dystopia. You’ve seen this before. Hell breaks loose: people go crazy, form gangs, commit suicide, etc. Except for men dying instead of women, the story seems eerily reminiscent of the N64’s Battle Tanx, which is as sophisticated as anything called Battle Tanx should be.

Verdict: I’d recommend giving The Last Man a look. Its execution is uneven, but I think that it has potential.

Oh, also. If you’re interested in working with comic books and/or visual design for superheroes, I’d really recommend it. There’s a few shots of the main character wearing a biomask with a hooded jacket and I think that the art does a really nice job of making someone with a mask look human. That’s always been one of my problems with masked heroes, that they look like machines.