Armageddon & Son

Armageddon & Son

Doonald Feeney wants to be tough, but he’s a selfish loser. He’s never known his dad, until one day, Father Feeney reappears in Armageddon & Son.

It turns out that Dad is a supervillain out to destroy the world, only he’s not as good at it as he portrays himself to be. As a result, some of his cohorts have stolen his plan, so he enlists Doonald to help him save the world (because if he can’t destroy it, no one can).

Writer John Layman puts an amusing spin on the clichéd “I’ll show the reader how tough my bad guy is, I’ll have him kill off a henchman” scene by having Dad introduced that way… only Dad isn’t as good at it as he should be. Maybe Doonald also inherited some of his incompetence from Dad. And maybe Doon’s vision of Dad reflects the way sons want to see their fathers as the best possible whatever-they-may-be.

Armageddon & Son

The art by Dave Dumeer is oddly wiggly, and everyone vaguely resembles zombies or apes, which is sometimes interesting for their character and sometimes not. During the requisite seduction scene, the woman’s anatomy is just wrong, and not in a typically overstated comic way; instead, key features don’t appear to be located in the right place. Overall, the book is moody and the artist does a good menacing, although I never understood why that other woman was half covered in music notation.

I think I appreciate Layman’s sense of humor better when it’s described to me. I thought the ideas here were funnier than the way they played out. (The same went for Puffed, Layman’s previous book.) This spy thriller/action comedy, by virtue of being a stand-alone, does take an unexpected twist, but it also depends on a cosmic concidence you can see coming a while before it does.



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