If Destruction Be Our Lot
Author(s): Matthew and Mark Rosenberg
Artist: Andy MacDonald
Publisher: Image
I'm going to parallel this opening with the other book I reviewed this week, Odin. Both are new number 1s with established writers in Tynion and Rosenberg. Tynion tries to be edgy, hitting you with internal dialogue about exposition, while Rosenberg starts off with Abraham Lincoln trying to finish his speech about standing up to tyranny, being heckled by a bunch of robots before he short circuits. Take a wild guess which book got my interest and held it for the whole book. Now, it's not very fair because Rosenberg wrote my 2025 book of the year in We're Taking Everyone Down with Us. His witty banter between characters is unmatched in the industry (see 4 Kids Walk into a Bank). So going into Destruction Be Our Lot, I had high expectations for an entertaining read with solid humor, and oh boy, Rosenberg doesn't disappoint.
The book takes place in a world where the humans are gone and the robots perform the mundane tasks they were set up to do 86 years ago when the humans were still around. We meet a robotic Abe Lincoln who tries to recite his iconic speeches while dealing with hardware malfunctions. His inspirational words fall on the deaf ears of the robots, who ignore or harass him. He encounters more robots and starts to notice that the larger fixer robots are just destroying the ones that are malfunctioning. This leads him to get on a bus that talks, and a funny dialogue starts with the bus about the meaning of life. The bus just wants to continue making her scheduled stops while Abe argues they should break the norm and see what happens. So he does go down the road less traveled with the bus, literally, leading to a cascade of events until he ultimately runs across what seems to be a human. The police show up, wipe memories, yada, yada, yada.
"But hot damn, this is how you write a number 1 issue."
No explanation of why the humans aren't here, no long dialogue of what the robots are trying to accomplish. Just multiple characters interacting and having smart, humorous conversations that propel the story forward, building on the intrigue of the book to ensure the reader is going to pick up issue 2. Or you can make it about cannibal white supremacists. See, Odin Abe is a great character, being the avatar for the reader (humanity) while he, himself, is just a robot trying to find the meaning of life, yearning for answers or even a companion. Rosenberg does it again.
Final Verdict: As you can guess, To Pull This One! It gets an A rating.