Ace-Face: The Mod With the Metal Arms

by Mike Dawson

From the pages of Superior bursts The Mod with the Metal Arms. This collection of stories by Mike Dawson (Freddie & Me) features everybody's favorite well-dressed crime doling out super-powered justice with his bionic limbs, and handling crisis at home as a husband and father.

Genres: Comics

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2009

About the author

Mike Dawson was born in England, and emigrated to the United States in 1986, where his family settled in Red Bank, New Jersey. He studied painting at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Since 2005 Dawson's work has appeared in a number of comics anthologies, including AdHouse Books successful Project: Superior collection, and issue #1 of the spin-off series, Superior Showcase. His first graphic novel, entitled Freddie & Me, an epic and unabashedly autobiographical story about his lifelong obsession with Freddie Mercury and the rock band Queen, was published in 2008 by Bloomsbury in the USA and Jonathan Cape in Great Britain. Italian, Spanish, French, and Czech editions are all planned.

Reviews

[Nick R · Rating 2 out of 5]

Generally incoherent with a hit or miss art style.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to admit that I was pretty psyched to see a mod/robot mashup comic and so snapped this up at SPX a few years ago. But the eight or nine shorts collected here weren't particularly compelling. The premise is that a baby boy in 1950s England was born without arms, and his mad scientist uncle made massively outsized bionic arms for him. As a teenager into the mod subculture, he dubbed himself "Ace-Face" (see the film Quadrophenia for context) and used his super-strength to become a quasi superhero. So there are a few simplistic stories around that concept.

Later stories pick him up in the US, where he's a middle-aged high school teacher. In one, he tries to put a stop to a vigilante who seems to be fond of excessive force, with unexpected results. There's a two partner in which an evil nemesis traps him and some superpals in a dimensional pocket and forces them to fight each other. Then a strange ongoing piece drawn in a completely different style about his grown son, lying in bed with his wife in Park Slope, trying to decide what to do about the group of loud guys drinking on the stoop.

Mixed into the book are two "Jack and Max" comics about two brothers who are constantly pushing each other's buttons -- the twist is that one is telekinetic, and the other can teleport. In the first story, they destroy a bedroom in a fight, and in the second they destroy a trip to the amusement park by fighting in the backseat of a car. These are kind of frantic, smash-em-ups that feel like something out of an old kid's book like Cor! or Beano... The small book ends with a two-pager written by someone else called "Taur Wars", which is more interesting than anything else that precedes it...

All in all, not what I was expecting and somewhat underwhelming.

[Josh Flanagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It got a Who song stuck in my head at 1:30 AM. It was fun and inventive and mixed up a bunch of things I've never seen mixed together. I wish it was longer.

[Larry C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun, slim book of story collections.

[Grg]

A little sad we never get to see Reverse Ace Face, a full sized robot with tiny human baby arms.