Friday, May 11, 2007

Weekly comic reviews for May 3rd, 2007 with SPOILERS

Woohoo! Today was a day of meetings for me. But enough about work, let's get down to business. One book to review today and it's Marvel Zombies: Dead Days. I considered doing a Spider-Man 3 review but I figured I'd put that in its own post. Hopefully I'll get that post done soon. :) I will say that I was a little turned off by George Lucas' comments towards it (calling it "silly" and "a silly movie"). But after sitting through the Star Wars prequels I figure Lucas' opinion of a movie really doesn't matter much to me. Though I do like how he selects the one big summer blockbuster that ILM didn't work on this year to criticize. Anyhow, on to the review...

Marvel Zombies: Dead Days #1 or 1 -- The Marvel Zombies stuff in general has been fun to read with twisted over the top violence and weird twists and turns that you just couldn't do with the regular universe version of the characters (unless you're Mark Millar and writing Civil War... ok, cheap shot). So the book definitely took some twists that I really didn't expect (such as who was responsible for aiding the Zombie Sentry to come to this universe) and Reed Richard's conclusion/decision. So it was interesting to read. But on the other hand, it was a lot of story crammed in to a one shot. And then trying to keep this story straight with what's happening in Army of Darkness/Marvel Zombies ("AoD/MZ" from here on as it's too long to type) while also hearing about what's happening over in Black Panther, well it's enough to make your head do 180's (get it? Zombies... spinning heads... okay, it's almost the weekend so stop criticizing me for lame jokes). But seriously, there's no way you can avoid trying to figure out the timeline as Thor is prominent in this book and not zombified (at least for most of the book) yet zombified in AoD/MZ. And Doom's appearance here as well. There's enough intertwining but it makes my head hurt trying to match it all up. Especially at the speed that this book goes. Honestly, they are rushing out so much zombie stuff to catch the wave that it's becoming more of a flood. There even seemed to be story elements that weren't really thought out all that well (such as why, if Tony built the portal thingmajig, did zombie-Reed take it back to his lab to try and fix it himself when Tony, you know, the guy who built it, was now zombified and probably would have been able to re-build it cause you know, he built it). As for the art, I'm not a huge fan of Phillips' work. His style does fit the zombie genre to some degree but the hero shots sometimes come off pretty weak or to be blunt, ugly. More so in this book than in the initial Marvel Zombies series (at least I found). So again, it seemed rushed to try and get it out in the market before the zombie love dies down ("zombie"... "dies down"... yeah, it's been a long week). Overall, if you like the zombie stuff then it's another fun read. If you don't, then you're probably better off skipping it. Though this could almost serve as a decent jumping on point if you're interested in checking it out.

No comments: