Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment
Writer: Van Jensen
Artist: Ron Salas
Colourist: Mike Atiyeh
Release Date: OUT NOW!
Price: $3.99
Eeeeh, when I were a nipper you could get a loaf of bread, a pint of beer and a big sack of spuds and still have change from a fifty pence piece. And a fully functioning human cyborg would only cost a measly six million dollars. These days, six million dollars would barely get you a bionic pinkie (does anyone remember The Steel Claw and Spymaster? Two bargain basement cybernetic heroes who could only muster one robotic hand a piece?).
The TV show The Six Million Dollar Man: Fall of Man #1 is based on finished in 1978, although there have been a couple of TV reunions with the Bionic Woman since then and a whole slew of possible re-boots have been mooted including a Jim Carrey comedy version which, thankfully, never saw the light of day. Inflation may have caught up with astronaut Steve Austin, TV’s premiere superhero of the 1970’s but in Six Million Doller Man: Fall of Man #1 Dynamite Entertainment are definitely partying like it’s 1979 in what sets out to be a continuation of the TV series chronology.
In The Six Million Dollar Mar: Fall of Man #1 a neat re-enactment of Colonel Austin’s initial crash landing right at the start sees him fitted with brand new legs, arm and eye but then things start to go seriously haywire for the Office of Scientific Intelligence’s top operative. Delving deeper into OSI’s murky past than the TV show ever did. Steve Austin discovers he is not the only augmented human on their books and turns rogue in order to root out the possible evil in the heart of the company even if it means turning his back on his closest friends.
Budget restrictions do not apply to comic books the same way they do to TV shows and The Six Million Dollar Man: Fall of Man #1 is chock full of other cyborgs, men with laser beam eyes and a whole posse of ninja’s spouting the most outrageously outdated oriental English this side of Fu-Manchu. As someone or other once said: ‘The past is another country. They do things differently there,’ and comic books have always had robots, cyborgs, androids and the like.
Since the Six Million Dollar heydey of Steve Austin and chums we’ve been inundated with even more alternative life forms to the point where we’ve become jaded and blasé about their existence. The great selling point of the original TV show was that he was different and cool. Do we still believe that Steve Austin is ‘Better. Stronger. Faster’? Only time will tell, and if it doesn’t work out they can always try again, after all, they do have the technology.
Reviewer: Gary Orchard
Reviews Editor: Steve Hooker