Self/Made #4 - Image Comics

SELF/MADE #4, March 2019

Partially playing out like a disconcerting rehash of the street-level foot chase sequence from Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 American science fiction action movie “Total Recall”, Mathew Groom’s narrative for Issue Four of “Self/Made” regrettably rips the comic’s lead protagonist straight out from Amala Citali’s intriguing computer game based universe and rather brutally instead plonks the conscious artificial intelligence smack bang in the middle of her creator’s ‘real world’ buried deep inside the electronic workings of “a top-of-the-line personal assistant bot.” This wrenching from the beautifully rich and well-thought out fantasy land of Arcadia to something more akin to the “Back To The Future” film franchise is so savage that it really must have disgruntled those readers who were previously enjoying this title’s prodigiously penned “Dungeons & Dragons” subplot, especially when the “superstar talent writer” merely replaces all the Gary Gygax-influenced gaming with so questionably tired and overly-used a trope as a cognitive robot woodenly exploring “George Street down in the Rocks” for the first time in their existence.

Admittedly, Amala’s subsequent impressively dynamic fisticuffs with a squad of heavily-armed law enforcement officers, spectacularly sketched by artist Eduardo Ferigato, undeniably provides this twenty-two page periodical with plenty of pulse-pounding pizazz. Yet such a scintillating scene, packed full of bone-crunching punches, kicks and shattered helmet visors, still debatably doesn’t dispel the feeling that what was once a fairly innovative storyline has suddenly degenerated into a bog standard run-of-the-mill Isaac Asimov adventure complete with flying cars, “roasted slum rats” and a mysteriously cloaked android interloper who is clearly not “with the game company!”

Quite possibly this publication’s biggest problem however, is just how utterly unlikeable the Australian author makes Rebecca in his comic. The socially awkward inventor clearly has a history of struggling to meaningfully interact with her fellow workers, and the general population at large. But in “The Ta-Da Moment” this absolute disregard for the feelings of her creation turns the lonely woman into a truly brusque, unpleasant character, who seems hell bent on blaming Citali for all her own woes when it is clearly the technician’s selfish determination to succeed with her “unprecedented and historic procedure” which is the cause; “I’m not going to bail you out any more. Do you understand? I can’t give any more up for you, I won’t! If you walk away now, that’s it. I’m cutting my losses. We’re done.”

Writer: Mathew Groom, Artist: Eduardo Ferigato, and Colors: Marcelo Costa