D4VE #1
IDW Publishing
Story and Letters: Ryan Ferrier
Art and Colors: Valentine Ramon
Edits: David Hedgecock
D4VE is going to be the next big sci-fi comedy comic book. Each page had me laughing at the dialogue and situations our main character, D4VE puts himself in. This is a story about a defense robot who is no longer needed to save the world. The best way to describe this comic, is to imagine the American classic “Death of a Salesman” but all of humanity (and life) has been eradicated from the universe and the robots they created, which of course revolted and won, have now filled the everyday roles of humans. Robot-kind has essentially become mimics of their former masters, filling in the meaningless dead end jobs, coming home to a robotic partner who reminds you of how much you miss the glory days and of course endless day dreaming about what made you special.
The writing and art of this comic is very smart and makes you laugh. Ferrier and Ramon have a great idea going and each page has me re-reading panels to see if there was some kind of subtlety that I missed. One such example is how they have no problem swearing and showing the words in the lettering, but the minute someone goes to say “Blue screen of death” it is 
censored, because that is the society that we are viewing. This is just a story about a robot who wants to be useful again, all the while making his life harder for himself. The parallel to humanity that this comic is exposing even goes as far to say that the robots have become so much like humans, that they have parades for everything (which is to say that parades are wasteful).
With the way this comic is going, I can’t wait for the issue where we get to see D4VE finally prove to his robotic partner, his kid that they ordered months ago (which is just another funny situation), and to himself that he’s “still got it”. This was just a really fun read that wipes the slate clean (in terms of human culture mucking things up) and lets us see the ridiculous notions that people (robots) keep and hold onto, such as the sometimes over glorified days of our past (Thank you Arthur Miller for first capturing that story in 1949.)