Slingers #1D

Background

None.

Story 'So Whose Idea Was This Anyway?'

Each issue 1 of Slingers told the same story, but at times told the story from a different character's point of view. See Slingers#1A for the full details.

After his phone conversation with Eddie ended, he gave the phone back to his dad and shut his bedroom door. He didn't trust his father, or his mother that died and left him with his father. He could only trust Eddie and himself...and Richie, to a point. He jumped out of his bedroom window as Ricochet, just before his dad entered with a phone call from his girlfriend, Kathy. He was soon riding the top of a bus to his meeting with the others, but happened to notice that Kathy was being mugged by a guy with a knife. He threw one of his disk weapons at him, which bounced from the guy's head to the alley wall, to his hand. The mugger took off and Ricochet asked his stunned girlfriend if she was ok. He handed her the backpack that the mugger had grabbed and by the time she had tried to finish thanking him, he was on top of another bus and gone. Her friends were there and asked who that guy was. She didn't know but she was going to find out.

As Johnny found out about the impending train disaster, he changed to Ricochet in an alley and jumped up a fire escape to the top of a building. Running across the roof, he jumps to the train platform across the street and lands just far enough to hit his stomach on the edge. He saw Hornet diving towards the transit worker and noticed he looked "ugly, mean and sweaty." Ricochet devised that the train wasn't stopping, the switch was stuck and the conductor didn't know. The control booth was across the way and he didn't have time to get there, so in desperation he threw a disk towards the booth's window. The disk bounced around the booth, eventually hitting a switch that stopped the train. The train careened out of control, smashing into the platform and causing a panic. He jumped to the train and helped the passengers escape before it collapsed onto the street.

General Comments

This feels like the weakest of the four stories. There is just too much happy coincidence for my liking. He happened to be at the right place to see his girlfriend get mugged. Meanwhile her friends had left her momentarily before the attack and appeared just as quickly after she was saved. Yet they and Kathy were weirdly calm after such a traumatic event. The same is true with the train accident scene. He threw his disk and it eventually happened to hit a button that stopped the train.

I did like that Ricochet and Prodigy took such different steps towards the civilians in the trains. While Prodigy didn't allow the train to leave the tracks, he abandoned the people inside. Ricochet's train collided with the platform full of people but he stayed behind to save the people inside.

Overall Rating

Looking forward to more.