Bruce Castle Presents: Secret Invasion Tie-Ins vs. Final Crisis Tie-Ins!

4 stars = Stop reading review and go buy now!!!!
3 and a half stars = Great issue and make room on your trade shelf someday soon
3 stars = Recommended and maybe even trade worthy
2 and a half stars = Recommended
2 stars= Not the best, not the worst, not recommended
1 and a half star = Terrible issue and vocalize your disgust at your next social event
1 star = Awful awful awful and you may want to consider dropping this title
0 stars = Next con you attend where the writer and/or artist are present you should throw this issue in their face

Mighty Avengers #16– Sigh. And so we get another SI filler issue. Again, I’m still finding these quite tedious. Oh, and something that heightens that feeling is these damn homage covers. They started doing these with the Marvel Zombie covers and then continued with SI. They were cool for the Marvel Zombie mini-series and that’s it! Once we got to the 20th printing of that hardcover and then now with the Skrulls, these covers are just plain crappy now! Oh well, I doubt this will change by the end of the event so yay I have four more months of this to look forward to! But I digress. This issue is about what happened to Elektra. Despite my earlier ranting, there was a lot to enjoy about this issue and I’m sure a lot of you will love it. This is coming from a DD fan so liking an Elektra story means something. However, this is a picture heavy book from the usually wordy Bendis. Unfortunately, when you have a story that depends so much on the art, if the art is bad the issue will probably be bad as well which is what we get here. Sadly, I found Khoi Pham’s art horrendous. His Elektra looks like an old woman! From the story alone this issue is pretty good, but because there are so many wordless pages, the shoddy art detracts from the story.

2 stars

X-Factor #33– Does anyone still remember when this was a top tier book? The characters were great, the stories were great. The art was unconventional but fit the story perfectly. Why has this book declined so much after Messiah Complex? I’m almost to the point of dropping this book, but then I remember the characters I fell in love with and I’m still interested in their story. So please Peter David, write better! This issue is a SI tie-in, but there isn’t much about Skrulls in here. We get to see a Skrull reveal which was a bit predictable but still cool, but that’s it. The rest of the book is just like a normal X-Factor book. Also, the Skrull in this issue doesn’t say much, but what it does say is very odd. For someone that writes dialogue so well, I don’t know why we get such weird lines from David. There are still some great moments in here, but that is overshadowed by the horrible art and a bit of bad writing. Oh, and this story is being continued in She-Hulk which is a book I don’t read. And sadly, I don’t care about this story enough to follow it into a new book.

1 and a half stars

Final Crisis Requiem-First off, I want to apologize for something. I recently said that I flipped through this issue and thought the art didn’t look very good. Well, after reading it, I feel that the art is pretty fantastic. However, I still feel that Mahnke got his reference pages mixed up and is drawing Impossible Man instead of Martian Manhunter, but the art was great. Sadly, that’s about the best thing I can say about this issue. I personally was appalled when I read it. It tries to ruin almost everything Grant Morrison was trying to say in Final Crisis. This is a retelling of what happened in that book and it pissed me off. This should have made me sentimental and left me remembering J’onn J’onzz fondly. Instead I left this issue blinded with rage. At first, I was going to recommend this issue if you treat it as a MM book instead of a FC book, but I don’t even think it works then. It doesn’t seem written well at all. I had an instinct to stay away from this book, but I heard so many positive things about it that I gave it a shot. I was sorely disappointed.

1 star

Final Crisis Rogues’ Revenge #1– Leave it to Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins to produce a decent tie-in. The team that told some of the best Flash stories reunite to bring us a new Rogues tale. The art is fantastic! I didn’t expect this to be so gritty but it is. The Rogues aren’t written as comic blunderers. They are written as tired old men that are still bad ass in their own way. They are villains with an unusual moral code and they are written extremely well. Unlike the aforementioned FC tie-in, this doesn’t screw with the main FC story. It is referenced and it seems a bit is spoiled. Perhaps issue 3 should have been out by now. It doesn’t seem like much of a tie-in yet, but it is still a great story on its own. There is plenty of set-up in this issue, but there is still a lot of action and cool moments with a cliffhanger that will leave you hungry for more!

3 and a half stars

P.S. For those keeping track, Final Crisis wins!

Review: Final Crisis: Requiem

Did you feel like Martian Manhunter’s death in Final Crisis #1 didn’t get the attention it deserved?  Are you even remotely a Martian Manhunter fan?  Do you like to see a great hero fight against overwhelming odds?  Do you like really pretty art?  Final Crisis: Requiem is a book for people who answered yes to any of these.

FC:R begins, essentially, with Martian Manhunter’s capture, as he’s jammed with a few hundred pyro-tranquilizers designed special for this by Dr. Sivana.  That right there sets up just how scared of the Manhunter the villains are – they treat him with the utmost respect, keeping him paralyzed for fear of his retaliation.  If you wanted a lengthened scene of the fall of Martian Manhunter, you’d love this book.

Unfortunately, there are a few disconnects between this and the main narrative.  First off, for al that people did complain about the suddenness of Martian Manhunter’s death, it was a rather pivotal theme-setting moment in the book.  It set the idea that nothing was sacred. The Martian’s death wasn’t heroic – it was a brutal execution, and Morrison portrayed it like that for a  reason.  People whined about how disrespectful it was to the Martian Manhunter, completely missing or unwilling to accept the point: the villains WERE disrespecting the Manhunter, and they had the power to do it. 

Another disconnect is more minor, and more subtle.  In the first two books of Final Crisis, I don’t recall anyone saying the Batman was still Bruce.  I don’t recall ever seeing Batman without his mask.  Final Crisis takes place after RIP, and Morrison seemed to be playing a little cagey on just who Batman was.  There’s nothing to suggest it ISN’T Bruce, but he keeps up that little bit of mystery intact for RIP fans – mystery that is ripped away by Requiem, which repeatedly says that Bruce is still Bruce, Alfred is still Alfred, Dick is still Dick, etc….  So, either there are some pretty big spoilers here, or DC’s editorial managed yet another massive cock-up – not that just such a mistake would be uncommon, given their recent track record on Countdown and DotNG.

The sense that the villains are powerful and, for the first time, have the ability to really hurt the heroes has been destroyed in this book, which seems designed to cash in on both the Manhunter fans and the Final Crisis fans.  In the end, however, this book is mainly for the J’onn fans, and it’s a pretty good one for them, providing great art from Doug Mahnke, an interesting history of Mars and J’onn’s life there, and a plenty of references to J’onn’s past books.  To fans of Final Crisis, it proves a startling disconnect from the ideas and themes of the main book, while adding nothing particularly consequential to them, at least at first glance, making it the worst kind of tie-in: it contributes nothing whatsoever to the main story.  It’s still a pretty good story, but don’t read it just because you’re interested in Final Crisis.  The meat of the story is in the main book – this is ultimately just fluff for the fans.

Rating: B