Villordsutch reviews MPH #2…
“A good guy dealt a tough hand, Roscoe’s found the perfect Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card in the form of super-speed pills called MPH. Now that he knows who put him away, he’ll find that revenge is a dish best served…lightning fast! The all-new Millarworld Universe zooms ahead at breakneck speed with Millar and Fegredo’s urban adventure tale.”
MPH doesn’t stop for breath as it steps into its next instalment with issue #2. We start by getting a glimpse into the world of Rosa, the girlfriend of Roscoe, and the gangs that are starting to move into her neighbourhood, forcing her brother to hide a rather large quantity of guns in their home. When she does confront she gets aggressively barked down by members of the gang. Our story quickly cuts to Roscoe delivering some MPH-induced swift revenge upon Hal, then Roscoe decides it’s time to bring his girlfriend and best friend in on his new found power.
The story has become of interest to me; yes there is an element of hijinks but only slightly, as Roscoe allows his girlfriend Rosa and best friend Chevy to try the drug MPH and they go on a four-minute run across America exploring their new powers and abilities, with Chevy raising an interesting question about the ability to talk and hear at the beginning. What starts as the instant gratification of shiny baubles of Rolex watches and flat-screen televisions becomes the more loftier plans of Roscoe, in little over thirty minutes, with ideas of taking down major corporations that destroyed their city of Detroit. Then to see Rosa’s deliverance of instant karma on the same gangs that barked her down early was very interesting, running alongside the conversation of the major corporations that have destroyed the city.
The only downside to the story for me – and it’s only slight – was again the “Cloak and Dagger” section or “The Department of Extra-Normal Operations”. I’m very interested in this and like last issue we have such a small amount given to us here in this issue – just one page of it. I’d really like to see more of this.
I hoped in my last review that Mark Millar would keep my interest enough with the second issue and he did just that, along with this the artist skills of Duncan Fegredo moving the comic along at an amazing pace to keep me excited with the look of the whole bag. With three issues to go I can see this comic becoming amazingly frantic.
Villordsutch likes his sci-fi and looks like a tubby Viking according to his children. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.
Originally published June 18, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
