By fnord12 | April 3, 2015, 2:03 PM | Comics | Link

SuperMegaSpeed Reviews

Elektra #11 - Well, goodbye! This was an interesting series. I can't say i'm too broken up to see it gone. But it definitely had it's moments. Mike del Mundo's art was the main selling point. He says in his goodbye blurb at the end of this issue that he was strongly influenced by Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz's Elektra: Assassin, and that's what i liked about it too. Plotwise, i felt like things were too decompressed and meandering, and it's interesting to see that in his end blurb, writer Harden Blackman admits that he had no idea what he was going to do with the character when he started and that the editors had to get him back on track when he "lost the plot". In a sense that really makes this feel like a wasted opportunity. Even if the book was really intended as a vehicle for del Mundo, Marvel ought to have had a stronger strategy for the book. I feel the same way about Black Widow (which is still being published, but we dropped) and She-Hulk (cancelled). All books have a hard time staying afloat nowadays, and a book with indie style art and a female lead character especially could use all the help it could get. Marvel (admirably) decided to launch a number of books with female leads following the success/enthusiasm from Captain and Ms. Marvel, but "show up and throw up" was not a good strategy for keeping them on the market. I also have the more fanboy complaint of the casual use of villains, and that continues with the very end of this issue where a bunch of moderately powerful villains, most of whom in my opinion should be not members of an assassin's guild (but that may not be Blackman's fault), show up to get menaced by Elektra. I honestly would have liked this series more if Elektra got to actually fight those villains, preferably one on one, but actual super-villain fights were mostly shunted to the sidelines in this book. Still, there were some interesting moments, so i'm glad to have read the series even though at the same time i'm not too sorry to see it go.

Daredevil #14 - Based on the cover i wondered if maybe Darkhawk was in this issue. But it's really a daughter of the Owl. She's introduced pretty well. Seems more powerful than her father and starts off in an interesting situation with Daredevil that is handled well, as is the Owl/Shroud story which moves from subplot to main plot with this issue. This continues to be a really nice book. The ad on the cover informing us that the Netflix Daredevil sereis is starting soon makes me regret even more that Waid and Samnee are leaving, since that might have resulted in an influx of readers for a series that gets a lot of critical praise but only moderate commercial success.

Thanos vs. Hulk #4 - I've seen people complain that this series was a bait & switch, since Thanos turns out to barely figure into the story, with Annihilus being the main threat. And that is definitely true, especially since we know that this book was originally intended to be a story in Savage Hulk but was deliberately moved into its own mini-series with Thanos' name put first. But the truth is i would have gotten this no matter what, so i don't personally have anything to complain about. Well, i mean, i do, but not about that. I've enjoyed the series so far, but with this final issues some of the minor things that have been bugging me came to the forefront. The first is the scripting of the Hulk, which seems off. I've read a lot of dumb Hulk over the years, and he's never called people "dummies" or complained that the villain "flaps jaws too much". I get that that the Hulk has now had so many personalities that you can't officially write him "wrong", but a) this one is close enough to classic dumb Hulk that it feels wrong in an uncanny valley sort of way and b)for a story like this, you really want classic dumb Hulk anyway. The other thing is the big panels resulting in low content, which was especially noticeable in this issue which was mostly a fight. I liked the basic idea here, but it was probably worth 4 pages of story, not 20. I should start scoring comics with a panels-to-pages ratio and see what i think the sweet spot is. Anyway, this is over. Actually between this and Elektra ending, our pull list is i think down to just Daredevil and Ms. Marvel.