It seems to be the week of grizzled old superheroes facing their bleak futures. We saw it in Starlight #1, and there’s a bit more of it in Worth #1, from Aubrey Sitterson and Chris Moreno. Whereas Mark Millar’s Duke McQueen is an obvious Flash Gordon type, Sitterson’s Grant Worth doesn’t have that easy an archetypal allegory. We first meet him as a dashing young buck in late-1960s Detroit, riding around on a Mustang and quelling riots, saving people, and stopping guns with his ability to control machinery. He’s a hero that military guys call a hippie, and in the summer of 1967, he didn’t sleep for days in his effort to keep the peace in the Motor City. In 1968, he agrees to let a friend of his, Dr. Eddie Ludlam, study his power to try and replicate it in order to allow the masses to do the same.
Then, in 2013, he’s an old man living alone having arguments with his refrigerator.
It doesn’t seem as though Ludlam’s work panned out, but we also quickly see why the world seems to have left Worth behind – because machines did. He can only deal with old machinery, as he turns away a kid looking for help with his motorcycle because it’s a crotchrocket with a computer in it. Grant Worth can’t deal with computers. He can’t even use an ATM and has to wait in line at the bank to deal with his money. The man is certainly grizzled.
Alongside Grant’s woes unfolds the story of Elliot, a latchkey kid in today’s Detroit who lives in Worth’s neighborhood, trying to resist the peer pressure from his friend Damon about busting into abandoned old houses to steal their copper wiring for cash while working on his school robotics project. Elliot’s path crosses with Grant’s when Damon gets the bright idea to steal a bulldozer, which goes badly because it’s actually the opposite of a bright idea.
Worth #1 is pretty solidly entertaining, because we like grizzled old coots as well as glory days from important times in history, we like people who can talk to machines and talk mess to ATMs, and we like watching idiots who think stealing a bulldozer is smart. I almost didn’t review it because Sitterson uses “must of” instead of “must have” once and editor Paul Morrissey didn’t catch it (sorry to only call out an editor for mistakes – but I’m one, too, and I expect to be called out on mine so I can fix them and avoid them in the future), and my hatred for “of” instead of “have” or even “apostrophe-ve” makes me twitch. But thankfully, I got over myself so I can tell you that Chris Moreno’s artwork is also pretty interesting, as he crafts a very different style – also thanks to Cirque Studios coloring – to denote the difference between Worth’s heyday and the grit of the now.
So that’s a thumbs up, a notch in the yay column for Roddenbery and Arcana and Worth #1. It’s definitely worth a look.
