Invincible presents Atom Eve #2
Image Comics
Writer: Benito Cereno
Artist: Nate Bellegarde
Colorist: Bill Crabtree

Jessica Rabbit's love child.

Side stories like this are like the Cadillac Escalade. There’s no decent reason for them to exist, but the powers that be know gullible people will pay for them.

…yes, I paid for this too.

Atom Eve #1 was an all-around mess. The art was ugly, the characterizations were unconvincing, and it only barely contributed to the Invincible universe mythology. Atom Eve #2 proves that, yes, things can always get worse. In this issue, a pre-teen Atom Eve faces off against the other children who were also the result of the government experiment that created her. They fight for awhile, some things happen, and boy oh boy is there ever a conclusion. Sort of.

Last issue, writer Benito Cereno’s big problem was his inability to writer each character’s dialogue in a unique voice. Invincible writer Robert Kirkman excels at this; each character sounds and acts differently. In Atom Eve #2, Cereno has gotten slightly better. The scientist who created Eve sounds a little older and more intelligent, the villains are somewhat believable, and even Eve gets a (single) funny one-liner. Too bad this mild improvement isn’t enough to balance out the tasteless and overly depressing killings, pointless deaths, executions, familial strife, etc. But Cereno isn’t totally to blame.

Cereno’s story actually does a decent job of imitating the darker side of the Invincible world. When Invincible creator Robert Kirkman is good, he’s the best. At the top of his game, no one matches his imagination, skill and humor. That’s only one side of Invincible, though. The other side is the random brutality that rears it’s head occasionally (as in Invincible #39-41). This side of the Invincible mythos is unnecessarily bleak, and gets in the way of the many things Kirkman does right.

This is all to say that Atom Eve #2 imitates the nastier side of the Invincible mythos pretty well, so Benito Cereno isn’t completely to blame.

On the art end, penciler Nate Bellegarde still makes his characters look too much like Steven Kellogg sketches, but the layouts in this issue at least provide some visual oomph.