by guitarsmashley » Mon Jun 29, 2009 1:53 pm
Review time.
I have not read an X-men comic outside of the group for a long time(morrison's run followed by the first quarter of whedon) other than Old man logan. I also haven't been exposed to a comic by fanboy love interest Matt Fraction that I loved either. So I came into this with optimistic yet jaded thoughts.
What I found was something I've come to expect from Fraction written books, a jumbled mess with a couple of nuggets here and there. I was always willing to blame artists for the story being disjointed whether it be Gabriel Ba or David Aja(trying way to hard to be Alex Maleev) they just couldn't translate Fraction's scripts to panels and pages well after seeing what Silvestri put out I suddenly think that maybe the issue is with Fraction. I haven't read a comic by him that didn't flow from panel to panel. I'm not completely ready to give up on fraction but I don't think I can read anything by him without having this very jaded first opinion.
The story suffers from what a lot of "event" comics suffer from no matter how large or small they might be, it's an editorial mandated story that is already laid out with or without the writer, problem is I just have a feeling Marvel talks to Fraction a lot so he probably sat with Brubaker and Bendis to come up with this ridiculous story. We start with a riot, now I wont go into who is at fault for the riot or who started it but where it all really goes wrong is the dialogue during the riot. The great thing about comics is they are a visual medium and don't always require dialogue and narration. The riot could have benefited from showing us violence not showing it and telling us it was happening. This was just bad form, and the eventual addition of the Dark Avengers felt very tacked on and barely fleshed out.
And then the final reveal... this was maybe handled the worst out of the entire issue. If the whole point is to show that Norman doesn't mind replacing people with doppelgangers then we learned that months ago with the formation of the Dark Avengers. in addition who could feel surprised by the fact that there is a fake professor when he's on the same page as his replacement, and not very well drawn either.
This brings me to the art, I like Silvestri and had he actually drawn the comic it might flow a little better, maybe here is where I blame Fraction unjustly since his script was handed off to a dozen and a half people to draw and there is no way they just did pages. No we have to be looking at panel to panel artist differences. I'd be curious to see just how much Marc actually did. And I like Marcs' work but this was not his work it was his and his sycophants. And as a result we get what could be a disjointed script being drawn by a disjointed art crew.
and for Punchy's information the best line of the book was, "Hey man, if you need to go..."
total score is a 4 for effort.
Take that anyone who says I don't take this seriously.
doombug wrote:You really are the george carlin of the outhouse. that's fucking hilarious.
I feel like a condemned building with a brand new flag pole.
- Les Paul
