Only two books to review this week, Civil War: The Return and Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show #9. Spoilers abound.
Civil War: The Return -- The regular cover pretty much gives away the big return, the limitted cover leaves no doubt. Captain Mar-Vell is back. My big question is "why?" Was it really necessary to bring him back? And why do it during Civil War? Was it just to give Civil War yet another "wow!" moment without really concerning yourself with what Civil War is supposed to be about? Was it like their reasoning for cloning Thor? Did they just want Captain Mar-Vell's likeness in their big epic story even if it didn't really make sense? All in all, him returning now leaves a bad taste in my mouth so I was hoping this book would alleviate some of those concerns. For me, it failed pretty badly in that area. The random "plucking" of Captain Mar-Vell from time seems to be something the Marvel janitor came up with because they couldn't come up with something better or more tied into the Civil War storyline. And since he still has the blackend (I'll avoid calling it cancer just as Marvel did) you have a character with a limitted shelf life (or he'll be cured of his disease this time which for me would be the wrong thing for Marvel to do for several personal reasons). And in the end, this half of the book played out like a 30 second movie teaser and really not worth the money. I actually wish I hadn't bought it. The second half with Sentry battling the Absorbing Man didn't really make up for it either. So we get to see Sentry's reasoning (somewhat) for registering (a few months late isn't it considering he had that dilemma so many months ago but has been shown to be on the pro-side since then). To be honest, I had to look up the Absorbing Man's powers because this idea that he could also absorb all of Sentry's strength and powers seemed off but it seems he has been able to do stuff like this in the past (like absorbing Thor's strength). So I can't criticize Jenkins there, he is sticking with established abilities of the character. It's mostly the other writers who haven't been consistent and haven't used this aspect of his powers. It wasn't a horrible story as you get to see what's weighing on Sentry's mind but since it didn't really fit with the first half of the book it made the entire book appear more as a "hey, we have a month to fill, let's throw something together." All in all, a pretty big disappointment for me.
The Great and Secret Show #9 -- I think a recap of this book would be next to impossible if you haven't been reading it for yourself. There's just too many characters and too many stories going on to do so. Having said that, this issue continues to work well. I can only think of one complaint I had and that's the scene where Raul is about to be attacked and you see one of the Lix (snake-like creatures) start to move. The problem, you have a few Lix lying "dead" on the floor and one starts to move but they put word balloons over the Lix that started to move. If you don't look hard and realize that little greenish part popping out to the top left of the balloon is one of the Lix you'd be a little lost. But other than that, I'm still enjoying this book. I'll probably still have to read it again after the series is done though. It remains too hard to keep track of characters and storylines with the month gaps in between.
And hopefully Carl gets his RSS feed fixed so he actually reads this review. ;) I'm not sure if anyone else might be having this issue but I hope not.
No comments:
Post a Comment