‘Hardware: Season One #1’ (review)

Written by Brandon Thomas
Art by Denys Cowan, Bill Sienkiewicz
Published by DC Comics

Milestone Comics is back, and Hardware: Season One #1 doesn’t waste any time whatsoever.

Curtis Metcalf, the genius inventor who builds a super-suit and an array of high-tech gadgets to fight organized crime in Dakota as the hero Hardware, is cornered by police.

Edwin Alva, the local businessman who put a child prodigy Curtis through school and employed him in R&D, has accused Curtis of setting off the Big Bang amid mass protests by Dakota’s Black residents against police brutality.

In prior versions of Milestone Comics properties, the Big Bang was a release of chemicals that gave many people – Black people – superpowers in Dakota. Those superpowered people were called Bang Babies – Static Shock being one of them.

Hardware does not describe explicitly what the Big Bang was in this version of Milestone.

However, his words point to that original recipe, noting that “some of the most powerless become the most powerful. And now the world is worried about that big payback … And they should be.”

Amid wall-to-wall action, Hardware fights police, escapes their clutches, and arrives at Alva’s business suite. Hardware told the cops that Alva is lying about him being the cause behind the Big Bang, and he’s gone to confront the man before all the evidence of his claims is destroyed.

The issue’s narrative is split in two. We hear first from Hardware, who tells pieces of his life story and his own philosophy of Black freedom as illusory within the system as it stands. The memory of his pet parakeet alluding to Maya Angelou’s caged bird singing.

Then we hear from Alva, and it’s a familiar story of white benefactors and young, Black ability or genius – the sense of ownership of that success that then feels like ownership of the person themselves. The sentiment wrapped into the idea of “you should be grateful for what I have allowed you to have” curdling into resentment once that charge no longer wants to do things their way.

The battle lines are drawn, and I look forward to the action to come.