Spider-Man: With Great Power… #5 (of 5) — Writer/Penciler: David Lapham; Inker: Stefano Gaudiano
And so ends another retelling of Spidey’s early, pre-Uncle-Ben’s-death career, this one shoehorning in encounters with a pre-superhero Marvel monster, crooked wrestling promoters, and a drunken older woman. Forgettable and dismissable: Lapham, who’s so good with his own noir creations, just doesn’t seem to have the chops for straight corporate character work like this (as he showed with that endless, incomprehensible Batman serial he did a few years ago); he has to rein in his usual effective nastiness, and when his art has to cover spandex instead of grittiness it just doesn’t seem to have its heart in it.
Wildcats: World’s End #1 — Writer: Christos Gage; Art: Neil Googe
What if they blew up the Wildstorm universe, and nobody cared? That’s the dilemma here, as the world’s gone to hell, and now the various characters are going to stumble around in a post-apocalyptian setting for a while, until it all gets rebooted or, simply, just sputters to a halt. Seriously: does anybody really want to read about these people being put through these events? The little bit of energy generated from watching the anthill get kicked over dissipates quickly, and the reader is left with no point, no passion and precious little reason to pick up this series of books.
Project Superpowers #5 — Script: Jim Krueger; Art: Carlos Paul with Wagner Reis and Marcello Mueller
Speaking of “no point” — here, we’re reading about a huge cast of characters we’ve never heard of, doing complicated things in an unfamiliar world, and there’s just no entry point for the audience, no spark of interesting dialogue or better-than-average art effect to pull us in and make us care about what happens to these people. Even for actual Alex Ross fans, I think we’re past the stage where just a cover and co-plotting credits are enough; you can only be seduced by glitzy packaging wrapped a mediocre interior for so long before you finally get frustrated, and stop falling for the scam.
Reign in Hell #1 ( of 8 ) — Writer: Keith Giffen; Penciller: Tom Derenick; Inker: Bill Sienkiewicz
Satanus takes on Neron (and whoever else is serving Down Below), and Hell erupts in civil war. As with many other books this week, there’s the question of why we should care — here, the last page at least suggests some mild interest, as the effect on various occultists, sorcerers, and characters with ties to infernal power (Kid Devil, Jason Blood, etc.) looks promising. However, while Giffen knows the characters well enough, his scripting is too laconic and predictable; this could have used a writer like Bill Willingham to juice it up and send it in unexpected directions.
X-Men: Odd Men Out #1 — (First story): Writer: Roger Stern; Pencils: Dave Cockrum; Inks: Joe Rubinstein; (Second story): Writer: Michael Higgins; Pencils: Dave Cockrum; Inks: Joe Rubinstein
Kudos to Marvel for packaging two never-before-seen Dave Cockrum stories, one with the X-Men (from the era when Xavier had returned from his outer-space consorting with Lilandra), and one featuring the mid-period New Mutants (the founding members are still there, but so are Rusty, Skids and Boom-Boom). The problem is that both are obvious filler, the kind of thing that might have been done for Marvel Fanfare or to stick in the back of an X-Annual, and it isn’t hard to see why they’ve been sitting in a drawer in the Marvel offices for the last few decades: they’re supremely average, in both concept and execution. Whether to spend $4 on them depends on just how nostalgiac you are for mediocre mid-’80s Marvel stories.
Justice Society of America Annual #1 — Writer: Geoff Johns; Pencils: Jerry Ordway; Inks: Bob Wiacek
… and here, we have mid-’80s DC nostalgia, as Power Girl gets zapped back to the Earth-2 from the Infinity, Inc. days (courtesy of Gog, over in the regular JSA title), and is happy to be back in the home she never thought she’d see again — until, inevitably, things start to go wrong. Well enough done (Johns is nothing if not dependable at stuff like this, and Ordway was around for the original stories, so his art fits well), but, I suspect, this works best if you first encountered characters like the female Dr. Midnight, the grown-up Robin, the Batman’s-daughter Huntress, etc. when you were 12 years old; older or younger readers, who don’t have that golden glow of remembrance for books from this era, won’t find much to attract them here.
Phil Mateer
