BOOM! Studios release a graphic novel about extraordinary glasses that grant the user any wish they want in Specs. So whatever happens if you take Cyclops’ glasses and refurbish them on eBay, only then to recreate the glasses and added some sprinkles of magic just to create magical wish-granting glasses just to change destiny, you get this comic out of some illusionist asshole. For me, this is a rare sight to see for a comic that I’m about to review, and it’s about some glasses shaded with red that give the user extraordinary powers to grant wishes. That is almost like having an adorable genie from “Eight Billion Genies” on Image who wished for a super cool comic like this, oh boy I wonder.
The comic is written by David M. Booher and illustrated by Chris Shehan. David is an American writer who grew up in a small Ohio town where he spends his whole free time playing Nintendo, eating Lucky Charms, and every childhood activity that he’s doing right now. However his work is channeled with every media from the 1980s that he loved as a kid, then he co-created comics such as “Canto”, “Powerless”, “Killer Queens” and so on, and he’s also a lawyer by training.
The front comic is not that common to see when you pick up this book. It shows a skull who is trying to wear the glasses and the red lens shows two main characters trapped inside the red glass. It’s kind of dark whenever I see this front cover, but how can anyone who purchases the glasses would do something evil about it? What I really love about the front cover is the typography design that they made for the title of the comic. Now think about that font design, and go back to the Cyberpunk series which is 2077 and Edgerunner, I noticed that the lettering really looked like they’ve been using some paintbrush or graffiti to make the lettering of the title of the 1988 pen and paper RPG, and then remade the title as Cyberpunk 2077 as in typography design. And whenever I look back to the title of the comic, I just realized that they’re using the font as the Cyberpunk series, that’s really amazing. So anyway, the story might be disturbing for someone who wears glasses, so I might suggest cleaning your lenses before reading the details of what this story is about.
The story starts off in 1987 when two characters named Kenny and Ted, hanging out with each other, talking about comics, until some bully threatens these two and got into a fight, and then some other asshole who calls himself Principal Teague accuses Ted of hitting a student but it was Kenny who punched him. If he doesn’t know the safety of the students and the school district, then he should be fired by now. After school, they started talking about these “magic specs” that kept popping out on the ad page of the comic. However, the comics that Kenny found were so old that nobody knows that those glasses still exist. And so the next day, Kenny picked up a delivery box and inside is the glasses itself. Now is there any coincidence about it who ordered the glasses, no one, and it just makes it so simple that the glasses were delivered with magic. It’s granting a wish on a wishing star, except there’s that scene where he’s lying on the bed and thought about a wish that he should love him back, no homo.
Next, they tried a test run with the glasses and see if it was true. You know how in Death Note where Light Yagami tries to write a criminal’s name on a killer notebook and then 40 seconds later, the killer died of a heart attack. So here they wished for some simplest things, Ted wants to get his fastball better, and Kenny wished for money. And the rest of the pages are nothing but a wishing montage just for the fun of it. But what really makes this comic so sick is Ted wishes that the bully would leave him alone when he’s about to stab Kenny with a pocket knife, and all of a sudden, he disappeared in thin air. And the next few days, the bully is missing, and then the principal accuses Ted of the murder of that bully, and the sheriff and his officers arrested him.
What makes this scene so fucked up is that Kenny made a wish to have Ted disappear from town because they couldn’t handle the guilt that Ted made such an unfortunate wish to make someone disappear, now Kenny uses that wish to turn his back on him. And the rest of the story is all dramatic because is actually what happens between real life and fantasy because the glasses are cursed and his best friend is long gone because of the glasses. So before that, Kenny just wished that he should help Ted, so the glasses made him enter a room where it almost looks like the “Real Estate” door from Ask For Mercy on Dark Horse, and there was a room and a skeleton dressed in a woman’s clothes startled Kenny and suddenly it said to him that he should accept fate and keep wishing until he dies. So Kenny and Ted intend to destroy the glasses but they didn’t break them. They tried everything, smash the glasses with a baseball bat, a hammer, a rock, a saw or even burning it with fire or any other random shit that you can come up with it, AND IT DOES NOTHING.
By the way, do you know what makes friendship such a beautiful thing? Spending their time with each other until fate decides just to let go and move on. From what I understand is that betraying someone is not very nice after seeing what Kenny wished for to see Ted suffer is something that I truly have against. But after all those events, he forgives Ted for what he has done to him with that wish. Even though he admits that Kenny loved Ted since sixth grade, even though he admits that he’s gay, but what I truly see is that they cared about each other to the end.
The story is quite intriguing to know how friendship works, even when they used the glasses for the first time, they know that these magic glasses work for wonders, but it also is a curse no matter how much you use those. It’s like the monkey’s paw, it works as a symbol of desire and greed which is everything that the owner could possibly wish for. But every wish-granting object comes with an unexpected curse. This comic however makes this so unreal that having those glasses to begin with was truly sketchy because you never know how long it still exists in the real world.
Chirs Shehan’s artwork by the way, do you know what reminds me of? The Stranger Things series on Netflix because whenever you see the character designs, you almost feel like you’re watching the show itself no matter how much you saw back then, it’s really nothing special. The only thing that intrigues me is the skeletons interacting with Kenny because it looks like you’re talking to Death in real life. I have never read a comic where the dead is going around playing dress up and wearing those magic specs the whole time, could it be a sign for another Halloween party? I hope this gives comic creators such as myself the idea to create a story about some skeletons playing dress up, Barbie style. So the only thing that I like about this comic is the skeletons playing dress up and that Cyberpunk font that they used for the comic title, so I’m gonna give this a pass because the story about a friendship with these two main characters is pure gold.
Newsdesk