Dynamite Entertainment
Keith Champagne
Jose Luis, artist
I decided to pass when Dynamite first announced a new ongoing title updating the concepts and characters from the 1970s television show "The Six Million Dollar Man." Licensed properties in comics are a hit-and-miss bag of chance with me, but the ones I feel hit their mark and that I enjoy are usually the exception, not the rule. That ongoing series launch was also being written and updated based on ideas by Kevin Smith, also a hit-and-miss variable for my personal tastes.
But I admit I was a bit curious about The Bionic Man. That curiosity increased when the companion title, The Bionic Woman, was announced as another new ongoing. And finally, with both series having several issues under their respective belts, a miniseries was solicited pairing the two title characters together. Or rather, against each other. I figured to wait for the trade on the mini and sample both updated characters for a smaller investment.
I once sought out and read "Cyborg," the 1972 novel written by Martin Caidin upon which "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman" television programs were based. That novel's Col. Steve Austin was not exactly the character as played each week on television by actor Lee Majors, but Majors' Austin is the one I am most familiar with and enjoyed as a kid. Same goes for Lindsay Wagner's Jamie Sommers. I enjoyed these characters so much, I own copies of all three made-for-TV reunion movies from the late 80s and mid 90s; they're still fun to watch.
When I cracked open this trade, I had high hopes but pretty low expectations. What I found was an equally mixed bag. It is assumed that if you are reading this miniseries, you are already familiar with these characters and their world from the new, ongoing titles; very little setup or exposition is offered. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that both Austin and Sommers work separately as agents of the OSI (Office of Scientific Intelligence) under Oscar Goldman, just like in the shows. A past relationship between Austin and Sommers is hinted at but not detailed; they work together rarely but well and seem to have a mutual attraction but also something that has forced distance between them. All of that matches up pretty well to what was established in both television series.
Most of the updating seems to have taken the form of de-aging the two leads considerably and modernizing their language and mannerisms. That was a tad off-putting, but not at all unexpected. It was something I could live with.
The depictions of both Austin's and Sommers' bionic abilities, however, was all over the map. They are depicted in this miniseries as performing feats far beyond what they ever did during the runs of their respective television and movie histories. Nothing in this series seems to contradict the established extent of the pair's bionic enhancements: Austin has two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye, while Sommers has two bionic legs, an arm and an ear. In this series, both make jumps and other uses of their bionic legs which seemingly would damage their spines unless they, too, were bionically enhanced. Both routinely use both arms to crush things when only one arm is bionic, but then this was an error made on the television programs, too. For example, using a normal arm as leverage while bending something with a bionic arm; that normal arm wouldn't be strong enough to provide sufficient leverage against the force exerted by the bionic limb.
But beyond this, several times Sommers' and Austin's bionics are said to have self-repairing capabilities, and the cyborgs seem to be able to control each individual bionic component independently of the others, almost like a Transformer or something. That's definitely an upgrade from what they used to be able to accomplish. The two OSI operatives are even described at various points as being off-line and even re-booted remotely in the field by techs back at the office. Are they cyborgs or flat-out robots?
Overall, this isn't a bad story -- a foreign power has created its own bionic juggernaut but not perfected the process, and this failing cyborg attempts to lure, kidnap and reverse-engineer Austin and Sommers for his own benefit. I was pleasantly surprised by how much from the bionic heroes I knew from TV had been incorporated into this updated version. But these are still different people, harder people, more cynical than the heroes I knew from my youth. Realistically, this miniseries has made me curious to try a collection or two of the regular Bionic Man and Bionic Woman series to learn more. But it hasn't inspired me to spend money on them. Instead, I may try to seek out more from my local library to see how the regular monthly series stack up against the TV shows and this series. Or I might just try to newly announced Six Million Dollar Man Season 6 series from Dunamite; maybe it will be more my style based on the name.
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