Review – Incorruptible #8

BOOM! Studios with Mark Waid at the helm and Horacio Domingues on the art are back with another issue of Incorruptible. This title examines what happens when a supervillain goes cold turkey on crime and decides to take up the mantle of good. Max Damage isn’t good at keeping collateral property damage to a minimum, but in his own way he is slowly turning himself into quite the upstanding citizen. He has taken down many of his former allies one by one to put a dent in the crime and madness caused by the world’s greatest hero, The Plutonian, going off the deep end and eradicating an entire city in a matter of moments.

Max has a partner, Jailbait, who was first insulted and ran away, and then captured by Max’s enemies to lure him into a trap. Upon rescue she was injured and had to go to a hospital. While there he fell asleep. The problem is whenever Max sleeps there is a brief period of time after he wakes up when he is vulnerable. After that he becomes essentially indestructible. Unfortunately one of the gangs currently committing a variety of the most horrible crimes found this out, and issue 7 ended with quite a shock as Max was felled with a single bullet to the chest. Issue 8 picks up in the aftermath of these events.

The Diamond Gang is the current group of evil bastards that Max is trying to fight. While Jailbait has been out a substitute named Annie was picked, but while she was with Max her whole family was slaughtered by this gang. She obviously wants vengeance and sees Max as a way to obtain that.

Annie thus dresses as Jailbait, and a series of events takes place from there leading to a little ironic justice for the racist Diamond Gang and finds Max with a new sidekick. Unfortunately all paths seem to lead back to Sky City, and while no direct conflict with The Plutonian has happened yet, the journey will take Max and his new mentally unstable partner Annie (dressed as Jailbait) back into the eye of the storm as it were. They are searching for a woman that apparently knows the secrets and limits to Max’s powers, and Max needs to know who else knows before he continues his fight on crime. I always like being at least slightly surprised by the outcome of events, and Annie stealing the Jailbait suit and finding her own twisted logical reasons to help Max qualified as such. Now he has a new sidekick that he is sworn to protect.

I like the underlying tense relationship between Max and the authorities. Even though he has begun to take down many different criminals in the city, the cops still treat him as an enemy. Very few people know, or at least believe, that Max has had a true change of heart. I wonder if there will come a time in this ongoing title when people will realize that he is really a good guy now, or at least he is trying to be. Only time will tell.

Next stop…ground zero. Sky City. Interiors below and the book is in stores now.