24seven, Volume 1

24seven

by Becky Cloonan, Adam Hughes, Eduardo Risso

24seven features a who's who of today's best writers and artists from comics, film and animation, telling tales of robots in the city that never sleeps. In the vein of Flight, these stories run a cross-genre gamut, from robot zombies to a prison break to a bizarre feud between a Siamese DJ team. 24seven has romance, action, horror... everything you want, all told by a cross-section of the most diverse writers and artists you'll find on the printed page.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Science Fiction, Anthologies

200 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2006

About the author

Becky Cloonan is an American comic book creator, known for work published by Tokyopop and Vertigo. In 2012 she became the first female artist to draw the main Batman title for DC Comics.

Reviews

[Matt Graupman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of my absolute favorite creators in comics are part of this anthology: Eric Canete, Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba, Jim Rugg, Eduardo Risso, Farel Dalrymple, Brandon Graham, Michael Avon Oeming, Becky Cloonan, and Jim Mahfood, just to name a few. That’s waaaaay too much talent wasted on a lackluster collection. “24seven,” conceived and overseen by Ivan Brandon, consists of 35 stories about robots. Some are romantic, some are full of adventure, and some are surreal experiments with the form, but in each one the mechanical protagonists are just like us lil ol’ mortals. In fact, the main problem with “24seven” is that the robots are TOO much like humans. Virtually every comic in this book would play out exactly the same if the androids/cyborgs/whatevers were swapped out for regular people and, in some of the more egregious examples, the only difference is that the “robots” just have a few seams or random appliances stuck to them. It’s hardly a good use of what should be a fairly easy premise to play around with. There’s some lovely work in this anthology but “24seven” would be most useful if it was scrapped for parts.

FAVORITES:
“Fear And Self-Loathing In NYC” by Jonathan L. Davis & Tony Moore - A series of accidents leaves a husband full of guilt and regret.
“Firebreathing City” by Brandon Graham & James Stokoe - A peppy, playful story about a first date gone very wrong.
“NYC Flesh” by Jim Mahfood - A funny and self-referential one-pager about a robot Mahfood trying to meet his comics deadline.

[Dannie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a dizzying mish mash of comics. A few of them were clearly written for humans, just had robots instead. Why was there always fighting in the background. Some of it was damn near impossible to read. The art is beautiful but the stories are disjointed. Kinda dissapointed.

[Burt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pick that Steve had got me for Christmas. It's a collection of very brief stories concerning an alternate New York where everyone is a robot. It sounds cool on the surface, and most of it is interesting, but there was one nagging thing about it:

Few of these stories absolutely required a robot to tell it.

You'd think that the authors would fall over themselves to tell stories with a robotic feel to them, but the stories that are told are largely ones where humans would have done just as well. There were a few notable exceptions in this case (Musical Differences comes to mind), but largely, the stories were the kinds of thing where you could swap out a person and no one would be the wiser.

Noting the above though, I think the book has an underlying metaphor: if you replaced all New Yorkers with robots, who could tell the difference?

Sounds about right.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Um. I don't get it.

Okay I do. I just don't think it was all that well executed. Only a very small minority of the vignettes in this collection REALLY made use of the Robots-Not-Humans assumption of the world. The rest basically just subbed in (admittedly cool) robot art for meat art. I need more than just a clever premise and neat pictures.

Guess that's why it took me so long to finish. Didn't hurt that I was flat-on-my-back sick for two of those 8 days...

[Cale · Rating 2 out of 5]

When you put together a compilation based around the conceit that everyone is a robot instead of a human, it would help if the stories in some way reflected that conceit. Instead, about a third of the stories would play out exactly the same if the characters were human, a third don't even make sense with robot protagonists, and a third actually seem appropriate for the compilation. The artwork in general is good to amazing, but the stories rarely made it up to the level of okay.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a little disappointing that many of the stories about so-called robots could have just as easily been stories about humans. The "robots" in question were only different from humans in appearance. I suppose that for a few stories it's a nice novelty, but when it's the exception rather than the rule, it gets old fast. The art was spectacular, however.

[Kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting stuff but overall pretty weak.

[Timothy Finucane · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of short comics centered on human stories with robots was, quite frankly, not very interesting. I didn't quite see the point of this one.