Written by: Bryan Hill
Art by: Nelson Blake II
Publisher: Image
I want to be fair to Romulus, but I’m not sure if giving it a third chance is necessarily that. On the one hand, the three-issue litmus test is an optimistic way to see if a comic will shift slightly into something you might like (see Kaptara and Snotgirl); on the other hand, I knew that wasn’t going to happen here. Romulus is either a terrible comic or so not for me that I can’t see it straight. Either way, I’m unimpressed, and either way, I feel kind of bad for the following words even if they won’t read as such.
See, it’s the characters that ruin this. I mean, the illuminati teaming up with a 20-year-old lone-wolf assassin is a pretty terrible plot even by young adult standards, but the characters really do lower the bar even further. Ashlar is as boring as boring can be, Nicholas kills every chance he has to be interesting by throwing his middle fingers around more than his words, and the secret fighting trainer decided it was best to steel every cliché he could before trying to train Ashlar.
At this point, I’m rooting for the villain. She’s black-and-white evil, but at least I can stomach her.
Ashlar, by the way, has the perfect answers to all of our mystic monk’s questions.
“Why are you terrible?”
“Because good writing is hard to find these days. The help, amiright?”
“Why am I kicking your ass?”
“Because the plot says you need to. Give me seven pages and some off-screen character development, and you’ll be really impressed because the plot will demand that.”
“Well why did you pull out your own freaking tooth?.”
“Uh…”
He’s got you there, Ashlar. He’s got you there!
Now Romulus, I have a question for you: What happened to saving five billion people? Where did that time frame go, because as of this issue, I have no idea how much time has passed between any point in this comic. It’s a countdown where the clock doesn’t matter.
All the while, Nicholas is hard-core captured—he’s even wearing orange clothing like he’s in federal fucking prison—and Ashlar is going off to train further because there’s apparently time for that. “Don’t worry,” the good guys say. “No one will hurt him. The plot won’t allow that!” So Ashlar has a rule-free issue to upgrade her kung fu while tension can take a vacation day.
Not that tension was every pulling any real work here to begin with.
So they take a plane to the South Pole, ignore time constraints, and then the one psychic girl makes a joke about how no one told Ashlar she needed a winter coat. Hahahaha! So funny! Queue two pages of bad action, some generic snark, and psychic lady singing to herself before we’re mercifully treated to yet another cliffhanger ending.
At least Ashlar has the decency to leave the comic with a solid one-liner.
Listen, we’re looking at a comic where nine of its 22 pages are Ashlar talking/fighting with a kung fu trainer that has zero characterization, and the whole time she doesn’t learn anything. She’s got it all figured out from the get go, from the reason why she sucks to the reason why she’s angry, and at the end she beats him down because she’s braver than he is.
That’s our protagonist. Next issue she’ll do something plot-stupid and succeed because Mary Sues are gonna Mary Sue.
