Written by Michael S. Dworkis
The MASK: Revolution one-shot seems like a long read, due to the long dialogue and the need to pay very close attention to details. I’ll get to this more in a moment.
MASK, for those of you who remember, featured the special forces of uniformed soldiers with vehicles which turned into other vehicles or mobile bases. This issue gives us a slight reminder of this, as the meat of the comic is to flesh out the team, who they are and why they are here.
Another major plot point is Major Miles Manheim. You can guess where this is going. He had a nickname in his old “Adventure Team” days. You know, the same Adventure Team which spawned a soldier named G.I. Joe. This nickname of Manheim just happens to be “Mayhem.”
The comic as a whole is decent. Not the best of the one-shot tie-ins, and here is why. There is way too much dialogue crammed in. This should have been two issues at least. There was a lot of information, and halfway through I felt I was being rushed to absorbed as much information as possible. A second read helped, but I still felt the pace could have been spread out and the information better served if this was not confined to one issue. We will be seeing more of M.A.S.K. in their own series as well as the rest of Revolution.
The best part is the focus on Major Manheim. The comic does a great job of displaying how he is a soldier at heart and intends to be the best military leader he can be, although as the issue goes on, we see his methods become a bit questionable. This is who he is. He wants an elite team and will mold his team to carry out the most dangerous of missions. In this one issue, a man who I grew up despising because, well, he is the bad guy, suddenly I feel for him and while I would never condone his actions, I can at least have a better sense of what makes Manheim into Major Mayhem. In a world being overrun by Transformers, a Space Knight who vaporizes human imposters, and more than he ever could imagined, Major Miles Manheim wants to protect Earth, but his way.
