Showing posts with label Dwayne McDuffie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dwayne McDuffie. Show all posts

Friday, July 25, 2008

Justice League of America #23


One-sentence summary: The second battle against Amazon continues in a truly ridiculous fashion that goes essentially nowhere.

Alright, first off, I am biased on this issue. I'm, for whatever reason, just not a fan of Vixen, so how prominently they're trying to feature her doesn't jive well with me regardless of story quality. That said, this issue is pretty weak. It opens, essentially, on Amazo taking on the Flash, which was actually somewhat interesting. The main glaring problem is that they try to cover up a potential problem (one that always comes up with characters like Amazo) with another one; w/Flash's super speed he could easily kill everyone, but if Flash can take it away why didn't he do that before getting himself beaten to a pulp? I know I know, it's a comic book, and normally I don't take issue with these sorts of things, but clearly the entire sequence was done entirely because the writer had taken issue with a similar problem. C'est la vie, all the same.

I've admitted in the past to being a story-lover, and it's true, so when an entire issue features nothing but a fight going nowhere, yes, I tend to get irritated. Maybe other people love meaningless fight issues? Personally, I'd at least require really original art to make up for such a thing. Instead, the art here...meh. I didn't care for the overly sketchy, lots-of-muscle-lines, style back when it was popular in the '90s. Now I don't care for it and it feels dated.

I'm sad about not liking this series right now. As a concept, I love good superhero teams, and I'm pretty ok with the current Justice League line-up. so it's actually a bit of a challenge for me not to like this series. However, using Amazo twice in less than two years (not to mention the arc he had in the now-canceled JLA Classified) is overkill for a pretty lame character (sorry everybody, but any mimic-type character is inherently lame due to the fact they never make any sense, even in comics).

I might be biased going into this, but, sadly, I'm more biased towards liking this series, and I still can't say I even vaguely like this.

Friday, August 3, 2007

Fantastic Four #548

One-sentence summary: Pretty basic Fantastic Four story, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Honestly, change the art around, turn down the emotions some, this story easily could have fit in the original Lee/Kirby FF. Sure, it has Storm and Black Panther in a minor role, but it wasn't that unusual to have guest superheroes in the original run either. The plot's certainly a classic: Sue gets kidnapped by evil rival of Reed (why are they always rivals of Reed? Why can't we have a supervillain who wants to kill Johnny to win a race/get more girls? Kill Ben Grimm so that he can be pestered by the Yancy Street Gang?), FF goes to the rescue.

Nothing's wrong with this sort of story. I'll admit, I like a bit more plot to my comics usually, but I still enjoyed this. Now if only they were constantly spewing exposition in alliteration...