Wow!! What a whole lot of nothing my $4 bought me today, with the much-heralded arrival of Secret Invasion # 2! (I wrote a bit about the first issue here if you're really interested.)A year ago this month, I wrote about how modern day comic writers tend to pad out their stories so that what used to occupy part of a 22-page story now spans multiple issues. This is a nearly-criminal case-in-point of that often-disappointing trend!
Almost the entire issue, with the exception of 3 pages at the end and the "free preview" pages for another Marvel comic that I have no intention of buying (Eternals), is one long extended scene involving the Mighty/New Avengers facing off against the just-arrived-from-Skrullsville "1970s" style heroes. In other words, that one spread from the first issue is essentially expanded into a series of "let's throw one-liners back and forth" and "let's fight each other" sequences, the only real development in which seems to be that we learn that some of the newly-arrived group were Skrulls (we discover this when the Spider-Man and Hawkeye from that contingent are killed and revert to Skrull form). This is a classic example of something that, if you were asked to describe what happened in the comic, and you did, the other person would say, "OK, that sounds sort of interesting... but what happens after the first couple of pages?" There really isn't anything more to be had there, though.
I suspect that some among the masses of comic fandom will hail this as more proof of Marvel's current greatness, but I really felt like I got about 1/3 of a comic for my $4. It actually made the first issue seem pretty great, by comparison!
No comments:
Post a Comment