Even putting nostalgia aside, I can recommend the Six Million Dollar Man as a solid, entertaining read that makes for a great introduction to a forty-plus year old character and concept. Dynamite Entertainment assembled a top notch team to bring this property into the hands of readers old and young alike and I for one am eager to get my hands on the next issue. Please let this be a monthly and not a miniseries. Read Full Review

I loved the Six Million Dollar Man tv show as a kid. The action figure is still one of my all-time favorite toys. Bigfoot has never been cooler. I’m a Steve Austin fanboy. At the same time I can see how cheesey and ridiculous this show was in retrospect and fully expect a comic book based on the show to take a different direction. If you are going to do that however, I suggest doing it better than this.
Art is about choices. I feel the choices made for this comic book were the least interesting that could have been made. What we get in this first issue is a young Steve Austin, bright-eyed and a bit naive, entering into his fist mission as a super-secret cyborg spy for the U.S. Government. It’s something new and certainly has potential. What we don’t get however is anything particularly fun,cool or interesting.

Lee Majors was cool and charming in a cock-sure way. His chiseled good looks, Kentucky drawl, and physicality offered a sense of a guy that might get in a barroom brawl on Friday and still be good to fly a rocket ship on Monday morning. This Steve Austin is goofy, talks too much, and is rather incompetent for a super spy. If you want to go that direction, push it all the way. Make him a complete jackass so full of himself he endangers the mission. Something akin to Archer on FX would be more interesting than this middle-of-the-road character who is neither heroic, nor the heel.

Another failure is that we see almost nothing resembling technology or hinting at how amazing six-million dollars worth of biotech might actually be in 1974 . We don’t experience any sound effects, visual representation, or barely a showing of the fantastic abilities Steve keeps talking about. If the creators were going for subtle, or building up to a reveal, they failed. I feel as if they didn’t make any choices, one way or another, about how to depict the cyborg parts of their cyborg comic.

Lastly the art is probably the biggest missed opportunity in my opinion. While fine enough for the job, I feel that if you are going to set a comic book in the 70’s about a show from the 70’s, how do you not have an art style that conveys the 70’s in any way? This book begs to be drawn in a retro style but what we get is a more basic touch.

Overall this is a light spy-action story with a sense of fun but lacking any real sense of danger that ultimately left me wishing the creators would have risked more.
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