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A superhero fan reviews: Eagle and Tiger 175

Genocidal alien Doomlord has the potential to be an insane comic book, because he's like this alien with a skull for a face and wings for ears, and he has this totally metal ring that can shoot death rays, and he has Superman's powers, only instead of coming to Earth to save us he was sent to evaluate us by these guys who are kind of like the Guardians of Oa only I think they're called the Death Lords or something - I can't decide if that is awesomely insane or insanely awesome - and he sees all the wars and pollution and stuff and he thinks "these guys are lame" and sentences us all to death, only he pussies out and now he protects humanity while living with this single mom and her bratty kid.  It started out pretty awesome with this whole "what if General Zod came to Earth instead of Kal El?" Elseworlds premise, but then totaly wusses out and becomes this story about someone doing good to the best of his ability and understanding, only occasionally he gets really hardcore again and kills people because he's an alien and has a value system that's different to the one he's come to admire in humanity, and that's kind of cool and deep I guess, but he doesn't go around killing people all the time and wrecking stuff, which is really lame.

I bet if Mark Millar wrote this, the alien would be awesome all the time and like throwing trains into London Bridge and then killing the king and letting them elect their own president and he'd say stuff like "class dismissed, your majesty!", but it's that Scotch guy Allen Grant who used to do the really lame Batman stories from like 30 years ago before they kicked him out of America, so that's probably why this sucks.
 
Billy's Boots starts off with this great premise of this juvenile delinquent on the run from foster care who has these, like, haunted sneakers that used to belong to this really famous soccer player, and when he wears them he gets this old guy's mad skills, so I guess this old guy is actually dead and it's his ghost doing it, or he's alive all along and the kid has the power within himself, which would totally be what would happen at the end of the movie version if they made one, which I would only watch if it had a professional wrestler in it.  They could have like Superfly Jimmy Snuka playing the old soccer guy, or a latino of some sort, I guess, because soccer is really big down there - holy cow, wouldn't it be awesome if they made a movie of this and they used CGI to do the old guy so it looked like he was being played by Eddie Guerrero?

That would be off the hook!  Anyway, I don't really get soccer, or sports in general, so this story kind of sucked for me, even before it got to all this lame stuff about people being nice to each other all the time and the people of the town all going to watch the soccer match just because it was happening.  I guess they didn't have Xbox back then so they had to do stupid things like that or be bored all the time.

Star Rider is probably my favorite of all the stories, because it's about this alien who comes to Earth to ride BMX bikes, even though he's like an alien octopus so he has to take human form before he can even use a bike without his tentacles getting caught in the wheels.  I'm not really into sports, but this is like X-Games and stuff, only before there was X-games so it's more like BMX Bandits but with ALF in it, if ALF looked like Cthulu sometimes.

The alien has this spaceship in Loch Ness where the US Navy is looking for the Loch Ness monster with depth charges and then it just suddenly ends as it's getting awsome, which is just bullshit even if it goes straight into this other story called The Computer Warrior, which is about this kid who goes into his computer like Tron and plays the games for real like ReBoot, even though the computer is like this old typewriter kind of thing hooked up to an old tv on this kid's bedroom floor but it still has the power to do this whole virtual reality stuff, which is insane.

The kid goes into the computer and there's this room full of other kids who are playing the game too, so I guess the mian character - Bob, just like ReBoot - has to kill these other kids or something?  A lot actually happens in all these stories even though they're only like 2-4 pages long, and this is very amateurish because too much is happening to keep track of and nobody has time to comment about how what's happening to them is like a movie or cartoon they saw once.

Dan Dare I recognise from superhero writer Garth Ennis' comic book about English people in rockets fighting space-natives, only instead of black guys they were green so that it wasn't offensive, but it's okay for Garth Ennis to do stories about shooting green people because he's Irish.  This version of the character is super-lame, though, as he just sits at a desk doing his job, then orders some people at a computer to send instructions to other people - it's a very unrealistic portrayal of a space hero, I mean he doesn't shoot lasers at aliens at all.

Robo Machines is like Transformers, except even lamer because all they do is run away from the bad guy, who's like this one person chasing these four robots in a giant spaceship filled with lasers and they still run away from him.  These are really lame-ass robots as well as lame-ass heroes.  What do you expect from Gobots, I guess.

Death Wish is actually pretty awsome, because it's about a dude with a Manowar album for a face who does stunts for a living because he wants to crash and burn and end it all, so he only does really, really extreme stunts, and when he goes out in public he wears this creepy mask to stop kids crying and people puking or attacking him.  It's kind of cool, especially when he totally kicks this guy in the face and then breaks out of prison on a Harley and then he promises that from now on he's going to only do even more extreme stunts.  This guy is pretty awsome,actually.

The Thirteenth Floor is about this evil computer who puts people in the Holodeck and then instead of making them go sailing or listen to Data singing, he makes the grim reaper put them through this evil boot camp where climbing nets turn into snakes and stuff, which is all kinds of awsome until the writer ruins it with people helping each other rather than winning the race, which is so dated and not very mature.

The last story is Golden Boy, which is another sports strip, about a kid whose parents die in mysterious circumstances and this super-creepy dude approaches the kid saying he has proof that the kid was responsible for his parents' death and the only way he'll give it to the kid is if the kid takes part in a suicidal death-sport tv reality show and gives this guy his winnings, so it's kind of like Hunger Games only lamer, and tries to hide that it's ripping off Hunger Games by appearing in a comic from 1985.  And what is it with sports in this comic book?  Why all the outdoor activities in something which is only going to be read by asthmatic virgins living in basements?  That's probably the most insane thing about this whole comic book, and even though this story has an evil reality tv show boss who literally has fangs just so you know how evil he really is, it's still pretty lame that it has to be about exercise out in the fresh air and sunlight, which is hard to relate to.  On the plus side, there aren't any women in these stories.  So there's that.

This book kind of sucks, but it does explain why UK writers make such awesome superhero writers - they had plenty of practice making up their own superhero stories so they could avoid reading terrible comics like this.  I'm glad the UK industry is only Thundercats comics now.  They deserve it.