Deathlok (1991) #1-5

Deathlok #1-5

Originally released in 1991

Written by Dwayne McDuffie (#1-5) and Gregory Wright (#1)

Art by Denys Cowan

I went to my first comic signing earlier in the week, and while I was there, I saw this comic on sale.  While I didn't buy it, I don't know much about the character of Deathlok aside from the rare video game appearance, so I thought it would be interesting to jump into this story almost blind and learn about this character.

Almost immediately, I discovered that I had made some incorrect assumptions about the character.  I figured he was a war machine sent back in time from some alternate future to undo a great wrong, like Cable from Marvel or the T-800 from Terminator 2.  Instead, he's more like RoboCop - he was once a cybernetics expert named Michael Collins, who discovered that the artificial limb project that he was working on was actually being used to create death machines.

His brain was transplanted into one of those cyborg bodies, only for him to gain control over it.  He apparently saw that his original body was alive, and hopes that he can one day return to it.  However, I have a gut feeling that it's going to turn out like a similar plot did in Swamp Thing, where by the time that he finds his body, it will have been dead for a while and beyond any hope of repair.

Deathlok isn't pleasant to look at.  I get that, as a weapon of war, he's not going to win any beauty contests, but he looks like his creators dug up a corpse, tossed it into a river, fished it out a week later, slapped some mechanical bits on him, and called it a day.  Then again, the company that made Deathlok is a subsidiary of Roxxon, and from what little I've seen of Roxxon, that sounds entirely in-character for them. (they're Marvel's embodiment of heartless corporate greed)

Michael hopes to reunite with his wife and son some day, but doesn't want to until he's human once more.  Michael's internal monologue is accompanied by the computer of the Deathlok cyborg, which serves as an assistant since Michael's the one in the driver's seat.

Issue 2 brings in some elements of the Terminator, or at least it feels that way - the opening scene where Misty Knight and Forge are chased by a flying robot reminded me of the opening to the first Terminator movie.  The robot is targeting cyborgs, though even by cyborg standards, Deathlok has it particularly rough.

When Misty and Deathlok track down the base of the person who's been kidnapping cyborgs, they find that Forge has been imprisoned along with Machine Man and Ultron.  They're left to wonder who could have possibly defeated and captured all of them.

Misty and Deathlok don't stand much of a chance against Doom, though they give it their all.  However, once it's clear that Doom is actually a Doombot, Deathlok's "no killing" protocol no longer applies.  Once Deathlok takes Misty to the Fantastic Four for her to recuperate and tells Reed about Doom's base, he heads back to free the prisoners, only to be attacked by a being called Mechadoom.

Mechadoom is an abandoned project seeking to make truly thinking artificial intelligence, which is why it captured so many robots and cyborgs. Deathlok manages to keep Mechadoom occupied with monologuing for long enough that it gives other heroes time to show up.

Dwayne McDuffie's writing is great, and the scenes where Misty and Deathlok discuss their problems and concerns with identity is well-written, though the art can be questionable at times.  Deathlok was meant to be ugly, but Wolverine doesn't fare well here either.

The series felt very much like a product of the nineties, what with the cyborg that looks like a rotting corpse who's heavily armed and has "death" in his name, but the writing helped to elevate it beyond my expectations of that era of comics.  The old saying "don't judge a book by its cover" certainly applied here.