Feel like he should jump to the right conclusion at least occasionally, by random chance.

So, I mentioned going through my recent-purchase long boxes the other day, and I found two of this issue...and I'm fairly sure I might have another somewhere! And the rule is, if I buy the same damn comic three times, I have to blog it. Which means this might be nothing but Groo the Wanderer posts for a couple weeks, but today we've got from 1996, Impulse Annual #1, "Speed Force!" Written by Steve Vance, pencils by Mike Parobeck, inks by John Nyberg. 

It's another of the Legends of the Dead Earth annuals, opening on the alien world M'toncanf--Milton Caniff? It's not a great world, but humans had crashed there yet managed to survive; then the whole place was occupied by the Dargonian Empire. Which doesn't seem to bother a headstrong young man, Trace Wyndham, who's looking for a ship out, to anywhere; despite not having any documentation, orders, or plans, and that ships currently weren't going out anyway. Running about the spaceport, he encounters a saboteur, who has super-speed.

The saboteur, Kinnock, is obviously the Max Mercury-type; and had a school full of young students he was training to fight the Dargonians. Trace wonders why he doesn't just take the Dargonians down himself; and Kinnock explains that would just escalate matters. Instead, he was using "invisible resistance," and through sabotage and theft was making them miserable, in the hopes they'd eventually decide the place wasn't worth the effort and leave. Trace thinks the Dargonians hadn't exactly been packing their bags, but Kinnock says they've only been at it for four years...

Kinnock also knows something about Trace: while he thinks he's been to other planets, he really hasn't. Instead, he was the sole survivor of a colony ship disaster, raised in virtual reality; which should sound familiar. Trace doesn't believe it, because if so, how would he know if any of that was real either? Kinnock won't let him go, under the excuse that the Dargonians were already stirred up enough; so Trace agrees to join their "resistance," if he'll help him leave later. Trace feels like Kinnock's manipulated him, but settles in to a dreary month two whole days of chores, then meditation; which leads to super-speed, and a new codename: Impulse. While his speed is impressive, it's probably not surprising that Trace has zero patience or impulse control; and a stealth mission to sabotage the Dargonians' water purifier goes loud instead: the whole place is blown up, and the locals rally around their new heroes, against the alien occupiers. But are they going too big? 

If you read any regular Impulse comics, you can pretty much see where that's headed: Max/Kinnock is always right, Impulse/Trace almost always wrong. I don't know if I agree with Kinnock, though: how long do you let people suffer under an occupation? Then again, fitting the tone of the story, the occupation seems oppressive but not unbearable; like the locals were being taxed but the Dargonians weren't starving them, teasing them, singing off-key...