By Zack Quaintance — One-Star Squadron #1 is out this week, and it is excellent. The book sees writer Mark Russell teaming with artist Steve Lieber, who is colored on this six-part miniseries by Dave Stewart with letters by Dave Sharpe. The concept of the book is that there is essentially a temp agency for heroes, a business in which DC Comics deep (deep…very deep) bench characters can find employment, providing heroic services to any who enlist them via an app. Think running security for unspecial events, appearing at children’s birthday parties, wishing folks a happy bah mitzvah, and you’ll have some idea of what’s going on in this book.

It’s a clever concept, one we’ve seen teased in other stories from the Big 2 (Nick Spencer once wrote an Ant-Man storyline that involved a superhero app), but never one that has given shape to an entire miniseries. The timing of this book is also more interesting than past attempts to satirize the gig economy through super heroics, with the pandemic perhaps pushing more of the public sentiment toward these types of jobs to a more critical place, or at least toward acknowledging that these companies aren’t acting in the best interest of the workers they employ (there has certainly been a lot of legal hours spent around their treatment anyway).

Of course, in comics as in most things an excellent concept is only as good as its execution, and so I’m happy to report here that the execution is fantastic. Lieber is easily one of my favorite cartoonists regularly making monthly comics and has been for many years. He’s coming off a string of career best work, dating back for my money to The Fix from Image Comics before carrying on through to the standout Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen all the way through to this.

Humor in any comic is a very tough thing to pull off, especially when you do it clever and subtle rather than the sophomoric over-the-top Deadpool fourth-wall breaking pop culture references parade. Humor in comics, for me, primarily only works when the visuals are working as hard to nail the comedic timing as the text. I’d be hard-pressed to think of another cartoonist with comedic timing as strong as Lieber’s, which is right up there with the all-time great Sergio Aragones. There’s a page here that especially stands out, wherein a flashback ends with another character snapping his fingers and asking if so and so is lost in a flashback. It’s a great chuckle. Lieber, I should note, is also capable of hitting deadly series and severely devastating emotional beats in this work, too, but more on that later…

First, a word about the script. Mark Russell is a different sort of voice in comics, and maybe the only writer regularly engaging with superhero stories these days who first and foremost strikes me as an interesting thinker. His work has been largely varied, tackling everything from deep questions about how modern religious standards relate to the morality those belief systems were built upon to corporate superhero parody. With this book, he’s revisiting territory similar to what he did in Billionaire Island, wherein the machinations of capitalism are chewing up the book’s characters. In this book, nearly every character is compromised by capitalism in one way or another, having set out to make a difference and do something fantastical…before ending up here, making cold calls or operating for personal gain before The Board. It is as is to be expected from Russell smart and deeply empathetic work. Which brings me back to my paused point about the emotion in Lieber’s cartooning…

With this comic, I expected a witty satire. What I didn’t expect is just how much heart is so far packed into this book, seen primarily through Gangbuster’s storyline but lurking around the margins for everyone else. I attribute this to Russell and Lieber working well in tandem, transcending the surface laughs inherent to the concept to find something deeper.

I’m going to crib directly from something I wrote for The Beat, “A lot of my favorite comedy comes from coping with trauma and difficulties, finding absurdities within the world just absolutely breaking your heart, and that’s part of why this book worked so well for me. I was kind of being cheeky before, but the real villain of this book really does seem to be the larger economic systems that have forced actual heroes to resort to doing what we see them doing here. And the creative team does such a good job finding emotional depth within that, being able to spend some time laughing at a situation where otherwise your only choice is to cry.”

That’s what we get in this book. It’s not raging against capitalism or the wealthy or anything else (not yet). It’s tired, like I know I am, and it’s stepping back to take stock of the human toll of the way we’ve come to live, using a bright superhero canvas to do it.

Overall: Writer Mark Russell and artist Steve Lieber are a natural fit, and with One-Star Squadron #1 they put out a first issue that is deeply hilarious, whip smart, and just heartbreaking enough to set the stage for a great miniseries. 9.5/10

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.