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rball's review
2.0
2.5/5: An failure that's interesting enough it almost becomes good.
The biotech angle is great - it's an underused aspect of genre fiction for anything other than antagonists in space sci-fi (see: Xenomorphs, the Zerg, the Tyranids) and Robertson's work is excellent - but Mortimer's a straight up terrible writer.
It's obvious from how he uses scientific jargon that he's read a lot of Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis, but unlike them, he has no ear for dialogue and he makes the classic writing mistake of making every element of the story weird.
In Ballistic the characters are manic, the slang is strange, the pacing is Looney Tunes level accelerated, the structure is dream logic, the setting is alien; it ironically becomes dull.
I'm not sure that I recommend this to anyone, but I am glad I read it and I'm glad that comics can still support out-there misfires.
The biotech angle is great - it's an underused aspect of genre fiction for anything other than antagonists in space sci-fi (see: Xenomorphs, the Zerg, the Tyranids) and Robertson's work is excellent - but Mortimer's a straight up terrible writer.
It's obvious from how he uses scientific jargon that he's read a lot of Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis, but unlike them, he has no ear for dialogue and he makes the classic writing mistake of making every element of the story weird.
In Ballistic the characters are manic, the slang is strange, the pacing is Looney Tunes level accelerated, the structure is dream logic, the setting is alien; it ironically becomes dull.
I'm not sure that I recommend this to anyone, but I am glad I read it and I'm glad that comics can still support out-there misfires.
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