A review by thestylishreader
Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 1: Going Underground by Gerard Way

3.0

Thus far, I have reviewed every single DC Young Animal volume one I have read (alebit I am reading them four years later than everyone else). Here, however, with Cave Carson Has a [wonderfully unexplained] Cybernetic Eye, I have found it tough to put a review together. It really does not have the wackiness in either story or art that the other Young Animal runs have had, and it fails to make up for that insufficiency in any of the book’s other aspects. It’s just kind of “there” for me. Nevertheless, I can still highlight some specific thing I loved and some things I…loved less.

Things I Loved:
- I love picking up a character off the forgotten list of DC Comics and treating him with the dignity and respect he deserves. I call that the Gerard Way way (haha get it?) Cave Carson, the Challengers of the Unknown, etc... have always been underused in my opinion. Let’s be honest: The reason we don’t know what the cybernetic eye does is that no one’s ever bothered to flesh it out.
- Wild Dog is the BEST thing about this series so far. He’s everything you could want from a bombastic, gun-toting, All-American sidekick for Cave, and honestly, without him, I probably would’ve given up on the story.

Things I Loved Less:
- *sigh* Here we go. I guess it must be said: Oeming’s artwork misses the mark. I cannot tell the minor characters apart because sometimes their features just aren’t stylized at all, and his attempts at depicting Carson’s psychedelic breakdowns (due to his malfunctioning eye) were just too confusing for me to wade through visually.
- For something that is advertised as a retired spelunker forced back into the underworld amidst his own personal demons, the latter half of that is barely touched upon in the story. A week after reading, I genuinely remember very little of Carson’s motivations for doing what he does. You could chalk that up to having two different writers on this one very simple, Sci-Fi-Camp story, or chalk that p to my bad memory. All I know is that it ends on a cliffhanger (uggghhh) and now my stubborn self will HAVE to read volume two.

TL:DR Overall, I give it a 3/5 stars. A largely forgettable plot with artwork ranging from joyfully wacky to incomprehensible is carried forward on the backs of a reinvented Cave Carson and Wild Dog. Tune in if you love modern takes on forgotten characters of yesteryear.