If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you’ll know that my comic reviews are constantly plagiarised, often within minutes of being uploaded, by a site that shall remain nameless. One amusing aspect of what they do is running my text through some sort of AI filter, which changes words here and there to try and make it look original (good luck with that, considering they also copy my images, which now include my name and site details on every one!).

One thing they have real trouble with, and which exposes the site for how it’s clearly scraping content in an automated way with no human involvement, is the name of the comic Troublemakers. They simply can’t cope with it all being one word, so the review immediately looks ‘off’.

Anyway, it tickled me to discover that, so I thought what better way to continue messing with their content by covering the next issue of Troublemakers?

Parker Matthews, aka Blur, is one of the genetically engineered teens in the G&G complex, and his superpower (or ‘biofield’) allows him to control signal wavelengths, giving him the ability to voyeuristically tap into video feeds.

He runs into trouble when he decides to stop channel surfing and follow his mother for a whole day, catching her in a passionate kiss with another member of staff. His father is always too busy to pay attention to his mother (or even Parker himself, most of the time), so when all three of the Matthews clan are sent on a mission to repair a satellite relay station, Parker takes it upon himself to bring his family back together once more.

Fabian Nicieza and Kenny Martinez (writer and penciller respectively; credited as co-creators of Troublemakers) really had something special with this comic, and used it to explore fairly relatable problems in a surprisingly mature (albeit super-powered) way. Though the art occasionally lapses into cartoonish over-expressiveness, which does ruin the fairly grounded tone at times, it doesn’t happen often, and for the most part this is a great example of an underrated and underappreciated comic that definitely deserves to be more fondly remembered.

The late 90s were a weird time for comics; post-speculator boom, there was a lot of trash on the market, but Troublemakers definitely avoids falling into the same style-over-substance trap which many of its contemporaries did.

You can buy Troublemakers #4 from Amazon, to read digitally, which is cool. The whole 19 issue run is available too; I’ve been reading mine after picking up several issues physically from Dave’s Comics in Brighton, however (got to give them a shout out, they’re awesome!).

Hi! I’m Jason, and I write for midlifegamergeek.com, every single day. If you’re interested in supporting original, regularly published, human created content (which has never been plagiarised or otherwise copied from the hard work of other writers), you can donate and help me to keep this site running.

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