Gail Simone and Adriana Melo’s Plastic Man miniseries is disposable trash! The story is all over the place - Plas takes it upon himself to be the guardian to an annoying street urchin and goes looking for her (or “him”, as the kid prefers to be labelled, though I don’t buy that kids that young and not on social media give a shit about gender pronouns), only to later drop the kid.
Plas is then framed for murder, though why escapes me, and then he finds out through another awkwardly introduced new character that a cabal of supervillains are trying to infiltrate the JLA for some reason. Why don’t any of the JLA get involved as well then - why is it down to Plas alone? Why was Man-Bat involved again?
There’s a side story that goes nowhere. A blonde (who, confusingly, is drawn identically to another different blonde character) who’s connected to one of Plas’ stereotypical gangster associates, gets weird powers in an attempt to be like Plas and decides, even though it was her gangster boyfriend who forced the change upon her, to get revenge on Plas? The fact that that storyline ends abruptly shows you that DC pulled the plug on this series early. Good choice for once, DC!
It all amounts to one big Who Cares? Besides being incoherent, who finds Plastic Man’s incessant wittering on remotely entertaining? It’s the Deadpool effect - the main character can’t stop blathering on with one bad pun after another bad joke after another bad pop culture reference. It wouldn’t be so bad if anything Plas said was funny but it’s not - it’s just plain irritating!
I thought Melo’s art was pretty good for the most part and reminded me of Darick Robertson’s stye. Plas’ constant shape-changing called for a lot of imagination and she certainly showed she has the talent and range to make this comic work.
Mostly though, this book showed once again why Plastic Man is nobody’s favourite character - don’t bother with this tripe.
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