Real Genius: Think Tank #2 Review
Think Tank is Real Genius with more realistic technology and without Val Kilmer. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to read.
I missed the first issue of Think Tank last month; contributor Trebuchet brought it to my attention over car bomb shots a few weeks ago, and I wasn’t able to get my hands on it until this week’s second issue release. And frankly, I wasn’t expecting to get a hell of a lot from it; jumping into an Image-published book by a creator who’s only written a handful of books (the last of those apparently coming out in 1999) can be a dicey proposition when it comes to following what’s going on. When you throw on top of it that the writer is actually a Big Cheese at the publishing house releasing the book, and I was expecting to be thrown off the deep end into an incomprehensible story, where all the setup had happened in the first issue, with no clues as to how to pick up what was going on because no one wanted to edit the boss’s work (that kind of thing seems to be going around these days).
Instead, I found a user-friendly experience where I got the gist of where we were, with some interesting back story about the protagonist, some good character work establishing that character and the supporting characters as multi-layered and interesting, and laying the groundwork for what looks to be a cool escape story coming in the future.
But yeah: writer Matt Hawkins has totally seen Real Genius a bunch of times.
Think Tank #2 appears to be an “origin story” for DARPA scientist / engineer David Loren, who has been captured after apparently attempting to escape his military base home with a seriously long-life battery in the last issue. The comic depicts the military trying to pressure Loren into returning to work via threatening his lab partner with a long stay in Guantanamo, and by arresting a girl he apparently met in a bar in the first issue (Jesus, the military in Think Tank has no sense of humor about their prototypes; they make working for Apple seem like a reasonable life choice), while Loren continues to plan out his ultimate escape. It also intermixes these sequences with flashbacks showing military recruiters expertly setting their hooks into a gifted science student, stringing him along by offering him everything he ever wanted… all the while downplaying that the cost was working on deadly technology, and his very freedom. So I take it back: it sounds exactly like working for Apple.
The main area where the book works is Hawkins’s depiction of Loren. Hawkins makes Loren feel like a fully-realized, actual human being: he’s cocky and funny and arrogant about his skills and intelligence, while demonstrating that he understands that those very characteristics include flaws that have not only left him open to being manipulated into working on deadly technology, but allowed him to remain willfully blind to the consequences of his work for quite a long time. A character whose “power” is being smarter than everyone else runs the risk of coming off unlikable, particularly when part of his justification for using his gift to work on weapons systems is that he was lied to from an early age, but by Hawkins giving the character enough self-awareness to admit that he did it because he liked it, it rounds out the character and makes him satisfying…
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