« Subway Reading | Main | Will I buy it? »
October 18, 2004
Subway Reading
Can the Yankees and Red Sox please play a game that lasts less than 4 hours? The books I read today may pay a price for last night's game, as both the outcome and the late hour of the ending left me more than a little grumpy today.
Secret War #3 - A lot of the reviews I see of this series complain about the writing while praising the art. I kind of take the opposite tack in my opinion. The story, while far from Bendis' best, has finally gotten moving. There is certain geek-out charm that comes from the appearance of second-rate badguys like The Constrictor and Diamondback. The painted art by Gabrielle Del-Otto, on the other hand... sorry, but I'm not feeling it. Maybe it's the quality of the reproduction, but it's often dark and muddy. There are other problems, however, that can't be blamed on the production value. The camera angles are too often straight-on and boring. Proportion and perspective are often forced and awkward. Speaking of inconsistency, there is also a problem of characters looking different from panel to panel. Look at the 3 head shots of Jessica Jones on page 7, for example. It looks like 3 different women. That page also has one of the harshest examples of forced perspective in the next-to-last panel with Daniel Rand & Jessica. Rand may be holding on to that railing to keep from sliding down the wierdly-angled floor!
The story? Eh. Not terrible but not remarkable. I kind of enjoyed some of the backup features, such as the non-colorized reprint of the 2-page spread fight scene that started the book, and the handy callouts of the badguys' identities from the final panel of the book. On the other hand, the transcript of Captain America's phone call was entirely unnecessary. There's a reason why some things happen off-camera. All in all this book gets 2 stars.
The Milkman Murders #4 - This issue wraps up joe Casey & Steve Parkhouse's look at the seedy underside of suburban life. I think I need to go back and re-read this series as a whole before rendering my final judgement. The story took a turn into psychological horror in this issue, and I think I need to read it in the context of the preceding story to properly evaluate it. I like Parkhouse's drawing style and design sense, but I think that the inking adds very little. Everything uses the same line weight. The inks do the job but that's about it. Grade: Incomplete.
District X #6 - Somebody at Marvel screwed up. The cover advertises Lan Medina and Alejandro Sicat as the artists, but the art inside was actually done by Mike Perkins and Drew Hennesey. This information is not revealed until the final panel, though you would have to be a blind amnesiac not to notice the difference. Maybe this was a fill-in rush job or something, but honestly the art was pretty weak. I actually preferred this inker to the Sicat's usual work; it was a little looser and more senstive than Alejandro's over-outlined style. But the pencilling on the other hand... awkward anatomy, lazy storytelling... I hate to say it but it looked kind of amateurish. It was an extra disappointment because the cover, by Steve McNiven, featured a great drawing and a striking design.
As for the story, I found this arc to be a little scattershot and uneven, and this conclusion only reinforced those opinions. The "Mr. M" character has always been sort of a gamebreaker, whose cosmic-scale power seemed out of place in this human-level drama. So to counter that imbalance, a second-string character's abilities are conveniently, inexplicably, and suddenly expanded to similar levels? I will stick with this series because it started out so strong, because this penciller was hopefully only here in an emergency fill-in capacity, and because this arc has come to a welcome conclusion. After this effort, though, this book has moved from a must-buy to the bubble. 1 star.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at October 18, 2004 09:02 PM