Every now and then I’ll get a comic and I’ll realize just by flipping a few pages that it’s going to special. What happens next is I’ll put it front and center on my comic book rack (yes I have an actual comic book rack, I got it when an LCS in Silver Lake went with newer décor and sold off their pieces) and I’ll leave it there. It effectively becomes my ‘In Case of Reading a Bunch of Shitty Comics in a Row, Break Glass’ comic. It gets saved for that moment when I’m so disgusted or frustrated by the caca poo poo that’s being plopped out by the comic book industry that I need something to remind me why Comics are great and why I drop hard earned cheddar for these books to begin with.
It’s no secret that I’ve grown to despise Marvisney and what passes as their comic book offerings. It feels like they’ve gone to great lengths to ruin their brand (Star Wars included) and to kill any interest in this medium that people like you and I cherish and hold dear to our hearts. At the risk of getting political, I would say whoever has actually been in control of the Presidency of our Country (clearly it’s not the Turnip Brain that shuffles around and poops himself) has also been actively looking for ways to destroy our country from within. Yet it actually seems easier to decipher the motives of a clandestine group of anonymous psychopaths within the walls of our government than it does to figure out why Marvel Comics suck donkey balls and rot brain cells on a daily basis. Seriously, they’re unreadable.
I try, believe me I try. Don’t tell me I’m too old. Don’t tell me they’re for a new generation. Great Comics are great for anyone, no matter what they look like or how long they’ve traipsed around on this planet. There’s no easy answer, but if you take a temperature reading of all the respected comic book pundits online as well as those who actually run the stores they’ll tell you that the medium is dying, no thanks to the Big Poo whose stories just seem like filler for the Variant Cover market that apparently nets them more income than actually producing great stories.
The other day, after perusing through the solicits for the next few months, I actually wondered to myself ‘Hmm, maybe I need to read more novels than comics. Maybe it’s time to phase this part of my life out and just wait for the trades, become a morbid soulless adult. That’s when I knew it was time to ‘Break the Glass’ and flip open what I hoped to be a ‘fuck yeah this rocks’ comic. Thank goodness I was right - This comic fucking rocked.
Why? Pure simplicity and the maturity to let the character breathe without extraneous bullshit being heaped on due to a need to ‘make an impact as an author’. Hickman’s one of the best in the biz, he can write anything. I’d love for him to FINISH writing a couple series that just stopped. Maybe it was his way of showing Matt Fraction ‘Hey, I can just walk away from a dope comic as well homie, what else ya got?’. What Hickman did with Doom was create a basic premise ‘Doom just got his ass kicked by Galactus and is floating in space’ and went from there; no frills, no complications. That also allowed this fucking beast of an artist, Sanford Greene, to just unleash an eyegasm of art that is the best work I’ve seen in a Marvisney book in a long time. It felt classic and new at the same time. These pages were fucking bonkers. Look at this one:
We’ve seen a layout like this before, a gaggle of heroes flying at a villain in a way that allows you to see all of them at the same time. The best part of this is Howard the Fucking Duck being inserted as one of the heroes. If you ask me that’s all Hickman. This book had a real old school intergalactic Marvel feel about it and putting Howie there just reinforced the vibe. The best book Marvisney put out last year in my opinion was ‘Avengers: War Across Time’ which was written by a Katz’s Deli regular and was a paean to old school technicolor Marvel books of the 60s. This was kinda like that one but more sophisticated and modernized. Jeez, can Marvisney just take this One Shot as a template and educate their writers ‘Hey this is how we want it done?’ A One Shot. Oy. It’s like they’re saying ‘Okay, we’ll make a fucking awesome comic, BUT ONLY ONCE’ then back to the poop!’.
What’s astonishing about this issue is that there isn’t really an ending to it. It feels like one immense set up for an epic battle that we never get to see. Yet for some reason it works. It’s almost like we don’t need to see it. Seeing it would somehow ruin the book; that’s great writing. I feel like most of the Marvisney Misfits would have made sure the epic battle happened in the middle of the book so that there’s enough time for all the characters to swap dicks and tits with each other.
One gripe that I did have is the ‘Sketches’. Oy. Sketches. I don’t need to see your raw sketches. I don’t need to see your ‘process’. It’s all filler. It's cheap soybeans! It’s Magnesium Stearate! Filler! It’s the bread basket at the Italian Restaurant. Stop feeding me bread baskets for pages! There was like, 10 pages of sketches! Is that why this was $7 and not $5? Are Marvel Editors sitting in Satan's Lap and telling him about their $5 Doom one-shot and Satan goes 'Make it $7'. And the Editors wail and cry 'How???' and Satan says 'Sketches'. Ooh, here's all the different types of sketches the artist did while doodling on a beach in Tulum. I mean, at least it's better than a backstory which 99 times out of 100 is going to pale in comparison to the main story. Backmatter is tricky, sometimes it's amazing, most of the times it's flip flip flip whatever. It's not like it ruined this book by any means, but I would've rather have seen more story.
Bottom line: Hickman wins again. Sanford Greene is a Star. Satan gets an extra $2.
RATING: 9.1
VERDICT: Still rooting for Disney Stock to Crater.
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