It's taken literally 18 years, but the entire comic collection is out of mom's basement and now is cluttering up the wife's and my apartment. I've been culling out some to give away here and there. And some I've been re-reading and, to varying degrees, enjoying.
Case in point, issues 2-3 of 'The Psycho' (DC, 1991, $4.95).
A three-part miniseries on high-quality paper (thus the premium price), 'The Psycho' was the work of writer James Hudnall and artist Dan Brereton.
I have no recollection of buying this back in the day, so it was like reading it for the first time. I'm presuming that it was either the art or Hudnall's presence (he being involved in one of my fave works, Strikeforce Morituri) that got me to pick it up and shell out that premium cash at a time (college) when money was somewhat at a premium. (Or so it seemed - I never imagined the tightness of cash that would come a couple years later living off $16K in Ashland, Ohio). Brererton, meanwhile, is one of the few painters who works pretty much solely in the comics art field. He's best known for the mid '90s book The Nocturnals.
The Psycho premise is a sort of Captain America/Martial Law offspring. The U.S. back before WW2 discovered a drug that creates superpowers, and the second half of the 20th century became in essence a Cold War over superpowers instead of nuclear weapons. The U.S. president is a former U.S. operative who killed Hitler and later Castro. The Soviets have their own army of superbeings. And there's a small island nation that offers tax-free residency to these 'psychos' so it has a booming population. (You and I without powers are 'norms.')
Against that backdrop, Jake Riley, a U.S. govt. agent assigned to monitor psychos, ends up in a Bourne-like thing on the run and being chased by the government and ending up having to get psycho powers himself. Thus he becomes this Hawaiian-shirt and mask wearking guy, The Psycho, who is - of course - the baddest of the bad asses out to uncover the conspiracy that set him up or something.
The whole thing is on the clunky side. The subplot with the Soviets developing the atomic bomb never gets developed well. Same with the issue 3 twist involving Riley's girlfriend. And the book seems gratuitously violent for violence's sake. While the initial premise is interesting, you've read this sort of thing done better in Martial Law or The American.
