Mitchell Maddox is America’s greatest hero. Once, he was merely a brave astronaut, but after a confrontation on the moon with some nasty natives, he wound up with a piece of alien machinery attached to his chest. And upon his eventual return home and a period of intense scientific examination, he was left with a dead wife and a shattered daughter. Now he uses the power of that alien hunk of metal to battle evil and safeguard the world from those that would cause harm. But before he can deal with a potential new threat to the planet from the moon men, he has to deal with something far more difficult: his daughter has just read the comic book they made telling his story, and dad had left out a few details over the years… particularly what really happened to her mother.

If you had to pick the five people who have defined Viper Comics’ actual comics output over the years, you’d pick Josh Howard, Jason Burns, the pairing of Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Les McClane, and Otis Frampton. So seeing two of them on a project together sort of reads like an all-star effort for the company. What surprises is the nature of the project; this book is far from Frampton’s charming kid-friendly magic series ODDLY NORMAL and miles away from Howard’s goth-horror DEAD @17. Instead, it’s a science fiction family adventure, a genre that neither creator has really worked in before. That alone makes it enough of an oddity that you want to keep an eye on it: how exactly will these two men do outside their established genius zones?

On first reading, I wasn’t completely sold on T-BIRD AND THROTTLE, as I thought it read a little too pat, too safe for my taste. But a second reading gave me a bit clearer look at it. There’s a certain sense of emotional ruthlessness revealed through Maddox’s actions and inferences over the final pages that hint at some depth waiting to be tapped. And the final page’s secret is a whopper. Ultimately, there’s a lot of room for this book to go in the wrong direction and be simplistic and dry, but on the flip side, these two talents have built up more than enough credibility to buy my faith and continued readership.

Marc Mason