Comic Quick Pick: One Month To Live
Comics! I love comics. I read some really great ones – along with some pretty bad comics (I’m looking at you, Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man) – this past week, how about you?
This week, I’d like to spotlight the new Marvel Limited series “One Month To Live.” I am really loving this series thus far. Conceptualized by Marvel editor Stephen Wacker and writer Rick Remender (who is awesome and should write more comics, just sayin’), the story is a weekly limited series slated for five issues that follows the life of an average Joe named Dennis Sykes.
Sykes is a normal guy, working a job he hates and struggling with his family at home as he and his wife try to raise their niece, whose parents both died. Tired of “watching the big guy beat the little guy,” Sykes steps in on an attempted robbery of a medical waste truck – which the robbers mistake for a truck filled with pills like Vicodin and Percocet – and tries to help the driver, only to have the would-be robbers beat him up and pour medical waste all over him and down his throat. Thankfully, Ben Grimm is in the neighborhood (I wonder if this is somewhere near Yancy Street!) and he scares off the thugs and takes Sykes to the Baxter Building so that Reed can treat him.
Unfortunately, Reed also has to break the bad news that Dennis Sykes has terminal cancer – he probably had cancer before the incident, but something in the medical waste mutated the cancer and caused it to spread to several parts of his body. He has a month, perhaps two at the most to live.
Dennis decides to do the best that he can with his life with the little bit of time he has left – the first thing being telling off his greedy, soulless boss. He also soon discovers that he has super powers – the ability to manipulate matter. With this discovery, he initially makes a few wrong choices, but trying to make them right, he winds up meeting Spider-Man, which leads Sykes to ask ol’ webhead to “mentor” him in being a superhero.
The story is two issues in so far, and it seems to be a kind of big collaborative effort. Issue #1 was written by Rick Remender and drawn by Andrea Mutti. Issue #2 was written by Rob Williams and illustrated by Koi Turnbull and Shawn Moll. Issue #3, which comes out this week on Wednesday, will feature writing and art by Stuart Moore and Shane White; the fourth issue features John Ostrander and Graham Nolan, and the final issue is finished out by Rick Remender and Jamie McKelvie.
This is a well-written, fantastic and thoughtful story. It’s very touching in a lot of ways, especially considering some of the things that Dennis does. He seems to accept that he’s going to die fairly easily, but he can’t stand the thought of knowing he will die and just sitting around and doing nothing, especially now that he knows that he has super powers.
If you’re looking for a great new series, I definitely suggest picking this one up. Even if it is only five issues long, it’s already an amazing story just two issues in.
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