Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct

Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct

By Paul Di Filippo & Jerry Ordway (America’s Best Comics)
ISBN 1-84576-298-3

It’s not all death, disaster and depravity for the super-powered police force of Neopolis, the city where every citizen is a superhuman, a god or robot or monster. Sometimes you get a day off for a staff picnic. However The Job is never far away…

When an ominous supernatural apparition appears over the city it presages an interdimensional Armageddon, but the weary cops have more than enough to deal with already as the new Mayor fires their old boss and replaces him with a paramilitary martinet who would rather issue loyalty pledges and spy on his own men than actually police the city or find the mastermind who’s drowning the robotic citizenry in a sea of circuit-frying electronic dope.

Tensions and paranoia run high and the apparition is only seconds away from destroying the universe, but will the cops even be able to do their jobs?

Set five years after the conclusion of TOP 10: Book 2 (ISBN 1-56389-876-4), this follow-up outing has great pace and ingenuity but somehow lacks the passion and humanity of Moore’s scripts. Much of the uniquely dull and dowdy feel is absent and even the superb artwork by Jerry Ordway nonetheless leans too much on the glamorously “Super” rather than the frailly “Human” side. I hate having to say something so negative about such an earnest effort, especially as its always the plaint of the old codger – but this just isn’t as good as it used to be…

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