Review by Ian Keogh
For a time Nick Wilson was the most powerful man on the planet, a superhero who didn’t need to bother keeping his identity concealed. That all ended when his powers suddenly disappeared. He now scrapes a living pretending to be a Nick Wilson lookalike, so will an offer from an old enemy prove to be his saving?
Eddie Gorodetsky and Marc Andreyko don’t take the obvious route. While this is certainly a tale of redemption, it doesn’t come via Nick’s powers being restored as randomly as they departed. He’s a nice enough guy, if broke, and hasn’t used the lack of what he once had to institute a self-pity party. In terms of personality he’s not that far removed from the Dude in The Big Lebowski, drifting along in a cloud of weed content to let life happen to him, and although there’s a bigger plot, much of The Further Adventures concerns following Nick around day to day. Both Stephen Sadowski and Ian Churchill are very good at drawing this, and then occasionally dropping in shots of Nick back in the day as the costumed saviour, this in various styles. Sadowski draws four chapters of five very nicely, but Churchill’s responsible for the multiple inventive pastiche covers seen on the front cover.
Seasoned superhero readers may expect that there’s a super-villain kick in the teeth waiting somewhere along the way. There isn’t. Gorodetsky and Andreyko keep this more or less real world, and if there were superheroes in the real world their living would be earned via merchandising, not financed by billionaire playboys. We’re given five engaging chapters of sitcom reality, and they’re the real deal, smart, funny and with a killer ending, so The Further Adventures of Nick Wilson is well worth picking up. Middle-aged men with a paunch is the target audience, and God knows the world isn’t short of them.
Unusually, the back of the comic pages from the original floppies have been retained, and they’re an interesting insight into whatever Gorodetsky and Andreyko had on their minds, and how it tied into a particular chapter. We have some music recommendations, thoughts on school reunions, Gorodetsky’s anecdotes about writing for TV, and plenty more, all of it interesting and worth reading even without being placed in world balloons.
