FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #2 (olim Collider)

"The Paradigm Shift," Part Two
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

It's a rescue mission into a dimensional anomaly.  Five people, including the CEO of a company recently under SEC investigation, get sucked into a Bubbleverse on an elevator in their work building.  Teams of FBP agents are shot (uncomfortably, with science) into the neighboring mirror world to retrieve them before the whole thing explodes in less than 30 hours.  Prodded by his increasingly suspect partner Jay, Adam agrees to volunteer, despite having just escaped a dangerous anti-gravity episode in the previous issue, for which he's still bandaged.

It's an unfortunate consequence of hard sci-fi storytelling that great ideas can get a little hampered by necessary exposition.  The Bubbleverse is a great idea, but for the agents "a little rusty on H. G .I.'s" (FBP #2: 5)—read: FBP's readers—we're treated to a debriefing to explain the fantasy physics and stakes of the phenomenon.  That it remains interesting is a credit to Oliver's ideas more than his prose style.  But once we get to the Bubbleverse, Oliver's vision and Rodriguez's whimsical art style really shine.  It's a clean, brightly colored world occupied by kind-of people who ultimately have no real definition and absolutely no identity.  The play-doh fusion of the falling construction worker and the passing pedestrian is simultaneously grotesque and humorous, particularly the surprised reaction of her floppy-haired dog.

FBP's weakness so far is easily its character development.  In Part Two we begin to get flashbacks and character history which, although compelling, elaborate the characters themselves proportionately little.  In part, no doubt, because the complicated conceits of the sci-fi, the characters have been a little neglected.  Their actions, particularly those of Jay and Cicero, are worthy of the conspiracy mysteries that they imply, but if FBP really wants to establish its footing, it's going to need to make me care about them all more than I yet do.

[October 2013]