The pieces begin to fall into place as Stillman sends Pitor Wyrd on a mission with the promise of freedom at the end.  But Pitor faces an unexpected foe, one he dangerously underestimates.  Will he survive and find the peace he craves?  Find out in our Major Spoilers review of Wyrd #4 from Dark Horse Comics!

WYRD #4

Writer:  Curt Pires
Artist: Antonio Fures
Colorist: Stefano Simone
Letterer: Micah Myers
Editor: Dave Marshall
Publisher:  Dark Horse Comics
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: September 4th, 2019

Previously in Wyrd:  Pitor Wyrd is the ultimate secret agent – an unkillable immortal tasked with the odd, the weird and the downright crazy.  If you want to off a prime minister with an unnatural love for pork, Wyrd is your man.  But he hates his life and looks for a way out, a way out that promises more pain and suffering than even he could imagine.

TELL ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS BEFORE

I desperately wanted to like Wyrd #4.  I didn’t hate it, that’s for sure.  But this issue, like issue #1, left me scratching my head.  Writer Curt Pires has come up with potentially a great series, but it never reaches the heights in hopes to attain.

Agent Stillman makes an offer the perpetually jaded Pitor Wyrd can’t refuse – in return for one last successful mission, Stillman will cut Wyrd loose and allow him to completely disappear.  Wyrd, who is seemingly unkillable, can’t really say no.  His insouciance, his ennui, demands that he take the opportunity to get out of the secret agent business.  There’s no challenge to big he can’t overcome, to his perpetual boredom.

What Wyrd doesn’t know and Stilmman doesn’t tell him that his final mission, up against a straight from Kansas, down on the farm, Superman analogue in the shape of a rampaging alien boy newly come into his powers, is a trap.

So in that regard, the double cross at the end is kind of clever.  Pires has lulled his readers into the belief that Wyrd is unstoppable, and the only interesting aspect of his adventures is which gruesome method of dispatch he’ll choose for his targets.  So when the boy proceeds to break Wyrd into little pieces, it’s enough to make the reader sit up and take notice.  And yet…

BRIGHTBURN LITE

The movie Brightburn is the latest in a long-ish line of stories, both in movies and comics, where the Superman analog turns out not to be interested in truth, justice and the American way, but instead is an unstoppable psychopath who regards humans as meat bags to be punched until they burst.    Personally, I don’t mind it, in the ‘can’t-look-away-from-the –car-crash’ perspective of it, but it is a trope that has limited value.

Anyway, it does provide an answer to what do you do when your lead character can’t be hurt.  Introduce a character who can hurt him.  It makes Wyrd #4 an entertaining read, especially at the back end of the book, and in a sense, it does provide a way for Wyrd to make his escape from a life he’s tired of.  I’m not sure it’s the best, or most entertaining way of doing so.  But hey, I’m a mere reviewer.

On the flipside, I really dug Antonio Fures’ artwork, with its loose inking.  It’s the most obvious thing in the world to say that comic artwork is a panel by panel affair – stop start stop start.  But that works to Wyrd #4 favor as the reader can allow the artwork to do the buildup to the action for them, allowing the tension to ramp before the final confrontation.

BOTTOM LINE:   RETREAD

By no means is Wyrd #4 a bad book.  But the familiar elements that feature in the issue make it a less than original work.  Curt Pires does well with the material he has chosen, but it’s hard to muster much sympathy for an immortal who finally, in a sense, gets his comeuppance.  And even then, Pires doesn’t let sleeping dogs lie.  The issue wraps around to the beginning of this arc, where in 2049, an aged Stillman finds an aged Wyrd, and essentially begs him to come back and fight a new menace threatening humanity.  A little like the elements of the storyline in this issue, what is promised in the future feels like we’ve gone back to the start once again.

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Wyrd #4

73%

73%

Retread

Less than the sum of its parts, Wyrd #4 is a so so end to an arc that never reached the heights it seemed to aspire to, but is never so bad that you can’t read to the end. Good artwork and a decent twist mark it as a book to go out and buy.

• Writing

  6
• Art

  8
• Coloring

  8
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