Atari Force Month: Enough Already

Here we are. Day 30. I'd love to have a big, sweeping final point to make. Something super clever and/or insightful to say about Atari Force that I haven't yet mentioned and would tie a beautiful bow on this month of posts. But I'm feeling pretty tapped, truth be told. I've said almost everything I wanted to say, and at a certain point, you're either going to read the book for yourself and form your own opinions, or you're not. Not that the goal of Atari Force Month is necessarily to inspire people to go out and get this series, but if you have no intentions of reading it, you've probably stopped reading this by now, too. So what do I do for this thirtieth column? It's a question that's been needling at me all week, and now here I am with no concrete answer.

I guess that, rather than reach for something to say about Atari Force as a comic, I could take a small moment to reflect on Atari Force Month as a project. I'm quite happy with and proud of it, because I didn't really know if I could pull it off. I moved from Texas to Massachusetts this month, I'm currently looking for work, and I've never attempted something like this before, on the blog or anywhere. I'm pleased to have pulled it off, and I hope and believe that I've done justice to this awesome comicbook series. It's a favorite of mine, obviously, and I enjoyed pulling it apart and looking at each piece and figuring out what makes it click for me.

Atari Force is good science fiction, good superhero stories, great art, great comics. It was spun out of a series of video game tie-in mini-comics, and instantly established itself as something much richer and more original than that. And though it wavered here and there, on the whole it told an excellent and epic tale about some truly fascinating characters in marvelous settings.

Anyway, it's high time to lay this thing to rest, and later today I still want to publish June's Monthly Dose column, so I think I'm going to call it here. I know that this particular post is sort of a cheat, and arguably so was the introduction back on June 1st. But I'm allowing myself this one, because I've written a lot about this title and I'm spent.