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October 20, 2004
Subway Reading
Marvel Knights Spider-Man #7 - This series bothers me for a few reasons. I'm not quite swallowing this "grim n' gritty" Spider-Man that Millar is writing. Mary Jane now packs heat? I mean, yes, if you look at it realistically, she is in constant danger and she would presumably want to protect herself. But I'm not reading Spider-Man for that. Like Matt Fraction said in his "Basement Tapes" column on CBR yesterday, "give me Pete working three jobs to buy Aunt May her pills and I'm there."
So why am I still buying this series? Well it was for the art. Frank Cho did one issue and I believe he's coming back for #8. I love his clean line & OK, I admit it, his cheesecake women. The Dodsons, up to now, have doen appealing work as well. But what happened halfway through this issue? Around the time Peter & MJ go to the high school reunion, the quality goes downhill. It's kind of ironic that in the same panel where the ex-jocks are talking about how beautiful & sexy MJ looks, the drawing of her looks like some kind of deformed fright-mask goblin. Brows suddenly start to protrude, arms get grossly long, and the inking gets heavy-handed.
One more quibble with the story here: isn't Aunt May still missing? Peter Parker admits that Rachel Summers could have been wrong when she told him that Aunt May was dead. And yet... he goes about his business, fighting with the Lizard, going to his high school reunion, etc? Millar seems to have grossly missed the mark on all the main characters, not to mention the tone that has made Spider-Man so popular for the last 40 years. I'm getting #8 for the Frank Cho art and to finish out the arc for eBay purposes. Then I'm washing my hands of this whole mess. 1 star.
Grendel: Devil's Reign #5 - Where the heck was I when these were coming out for the first time? This is a very cool book. The stylistic split between the geo-political intrigue story and the vampire story works great; the two formats compliment each other and give the overall story a scope that reinforces its scale. I am going to have to hunt down more Grendel! 4 stars.
Fallen Angel #17 - "Superhero Noir" done perfectly. Some inconsistency in the art, however. Backgrounds are a bit sparse and faces sometimes get wonky. On the positive side, the storytelling is well done. I don't know, this arc isn't grabbing me like the first trade did, but the overall tone and brisk pace still land this book in the top half of my regular monthly buys. 3.5 stars.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at October 20, 2004 11:11 AM