Review: Tyson Hesse’s Diesel #4

Look, man. I’m not exactly what you’d call a “history expert.” If it happened before I was born, how important could it really be?

I’d thought by the end of Diesel #3 that Dee was well into her “growing the hell up” phase, when she realized that her whole “sitting back and waiting for the thing I’m good at to fall into my lap” plan wasn’t going to work out. But in the fourth and final book she gets another wake up call. Several actually. None of them make her happy, but they’re all too obvious to ignore.

Lest you think it’s a preachy book, it’s really not. We get a steampunk/manga world, robots, post-apocalyptical renegades, and flightless bird-men out for revenge. Click the jump for a review of the last book in Tyson Hesse’s Diesel.

Diesel2Having found her adopted brother Bull last issue, Dee is quickly brought into the “herd:” Bull’s family under the clouds. She’s trying to track down her adoptive father, but as much as she tries to deny it, all the evidence points to two disturbing facts. One: her father may have had a major role in the war that crippled an entire species. And two: her brother was never “adopted.” He was stolen from his family, for reasons that still aren’t clear.

If Bull was stolen, what does that mean for Dee?

The art in this issue was everything we’ve come to expect from the series: a fun manga style, a steampunk-appropriate color palette, and hilarious expressions on everybody. In addition, when Bull gives Dee “the elementary version” of the war that shaped their landscape, the images were done in a neat, stylized format. Imagine a combination of Egyptian hieroglyphs and cave paintings. With bird-men. It was very fun to look at.

The writing, too, was perfect for the story: Dee is not, and never will be, a “Mary Sue.” She’s never meant to be likable. She’s selfish, immature, willfully blind, and supremely over-confident. But somehow we like her anyway. I think we’re meant to look at her and see what she could be, if she’d get her head out of her butt for five minutes and pay attention to something else other than herself.

Best of all though, at the very end of the book we got four lovely words: “End of Book 1.”

Diesel1I’d really hoped the story wouldn’t end after only four issues, and with any luck, Tyson Hesse and Boom Studios will give us an additional volume.

That’s more likely if a lot of people buy the comic. Het hem.

See you guys in Book 2.