BENJAMIN FRANKLINSTEIN MEETS THOMAS DEADISON

Closing a comical series’ first story arc, America’s two greatest inventors square off in a death match over the Emperor Napoléon’s scheme to conquer the world…with science.

Well, science of a sort. To the electrically preserved Franklin and his modern young cohorts Victor, Scott and Jaime, there’s something fishy about the “Infinity Bulbs” that the strangely familiar “Ed Thomason” is passing out for free. Their suspicions are confirmed by the discovery of a gigantic, almost-complete “harmonic supertransmitter” in the bowels of the Infinity Unlimited factory—a device that, at the command of the megalomaniac Emperor, will turn everyone within reach of an Infinity Bulb into an obedient zombie. Tuxbury and McElligott liberally endow their tale with patent drawings, circuit and other diagrams, and like techno eye candy as well as such general silliness as a wizened Bad Guy who gets around in an ornately decorated bathtub. It spins through melodramatic twists and sudden reversals of fortune to an appropriately explosive climax that puts Ben out of action but (probably) leaves Napoléon at large for future episodes.

Another entertaining foray into science both mad and real; new readers should start with the opener, though, to make sense of it all.