‘Amped’ Gets Juiced in Debut Issue
From publisher Absolute Comics comes the brand new series, Amped. With literary duties provided bywriter Brian Augustyn (The Flash, Lady Death), Amped puts a unique spin on the super hero team genre which seems to have been done time and again. Still, Augustyn finds a way to inject some much needed creativity into this realm and makes it work quite well to say the least. With effective visuals from artist Pasquale Qualano (Doctor Who, Heavy Metal), we get a cognitive effort here from the pairing which delivers a solid premier. So what’s it all about anyway?
With the aid of one Dr. Kane of Kane Kinetics as well as some highly touted government funding, the specialized team of six heroes has been formed to defend against any would-be threats that may be too much for law enforcement or even military to handle. While that concept isn’t new, the story behind the team is. Each individual in the group has suffered from some sort of debilitating ailment or accident. While their human forms have not been mended from such things, each member has a neural link that connects them to their android avatar counterpart, with each one possessing a unique ability.
The superhuman attributes of these characters range form your standard super strength and super speed, while additional abilities include absorbing and channeling electricity and bending someone to your will. I can’t say enough how much the latter of those would help when buying a car, but I digress. While the villain in all of this remains rather mysterious by the time the issue comes to a close, there is an appreciation from the reader’s perspective that not so much was given away from the start. We know the heroes abilities in detail, though we don’t know their personalities yet or what kind of chemistry is there amongst them. We know the villain wants the technology that allows our heroes to do what they do, but we know little else about the man/machine that looks a cross between X-Men’s Cable and Mortal Kombat’s Kano.
All in all, Amped is definitely worth a read and I will most certainly be delving into issue #2 when it comes out. While no exact date is given on Comixology of its release, one may expect some time in February for it to arrive.
