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February 02, 2005
Subway Reading: Adam Strange
Adam Strange #5 - On the plus side, the paper stock was finally clean white with a bit of gloss to it. The word balloons and page margins were bright and sharp. On the minus side, the colorist continues to add a grainy speckle filter to everything else. It doesn't help that the colors are so dark to begin with. The heavy reliance on the blurs and Photoshop trickery is the final nail in the coffin for the visuals on this book. Pascal Ferry's drawing is excellent, but he uses a fine line. Fat, airbrushed swaths of heavy brown shadows are not only unnecessary, they obscure the drawing underneath.
Andy Diggle's story long ago stopped being about Adam Strange trying to find his wife & daughter and thier missing planet. Since the second issue, it has been a romp from one space-faring semi-obscure DC property to the next.
The Thanagar stuff I was able to get into because it didn't rely on any prior knowledge, it had a self-contained plot, and the sole main Thanagarian character was strongly defined. After that, we got all 97 of The Omega Men. Plot-coupons were collected (the nature of which was nicely noted by the cat-guy when he referred to something as a "McGuffin"). Things descended even further into DCU obscurity in this issue. Not once, but twice, a dramatic identity revelation occurred and flew straight over my head.
I was always a Marvel fan, so that's the set of B-level characters that I know about and for whom I have a soft spot (I'm not making a value judgement there; it's pretty much equally pathetic either way). As such, this book clearly isn't for me. 1 star.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at February 2, 2005 08:18 PM
Comments
What timing! I saw your review of this right after I posted that I liked this issue (in the discussion from last Tuesday's entry).
For what it's worth, one of the big reveals is a character who was described earlier in the series. (SPOILER!!) The man who Adam discovers on the last page is the Rannian scientist who invented Zeta-ray technology, etc. This was all explained in issue #1. I've never read an issue of Adam Strange before this series, but it seemed fair to me.
I don't know any of DC's spacefaring stories, either (I had a vague idea of who the Thanagarians were, but that's it), but I've felt that Diggle is doing a great job of playing with these characters without making it confusing to us newcomers.
Posted by: Nevin at February 3, 2005 12:31 AM
Ooooooooooooh!!!!!!! Thanks, Nevin. My mistake. I am going to have to post a bit of a retraction today.
Posted by: jdonelson_nyc at February 3, 2005 10:52 AM