ADAM LEGEND OF BLUE MARVEL #5 (OF 5)
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Size: pages
Price: 3.99
This review contains spoilers, click here to read
And so the saga of the Blue Marvel finally comes to a close. Thank god.
I have to admit that this issue did a few things that I didn’t expect which, for a series so painfully predictable, was an accomplishment of sorts (although the surprises weren’t in the form of interesting plot twists). In the end, this series was consistent only in its poor writing, lack luster art, and incompetent editing.
On the opening splash page writer Kevin Grevioux and editor Alejandro Arbona leap right in with their trade mark material for this series. Grevioux delivers an uninspired tirade about the worst of humanity by remarking on the holocaust, the Russian pogroms, and other genocides (not clear exactly which other ones, so take your pick). This page, strangely, is meant to provide the villain of the tale with his motivation – the Anti-man has “returned” to destroy all of humanity because humanity has shown a tendency to destroy itself so it must be punished by being destroyed. Sigh. Remember that Tick villain, the evil midnight bomber what bombs at midnight? He was much more interesting.
As for Arbona, he does his editing trick by failing to notice that the dialogue boxes have a significant gap between them. Here’s how the narration flows:
Totally incomprehensible. I reread the page three times before giving up since I already “got” the gist of it. I’d actually gotten the gist of it somewhere around page 6 of issue 1, but just in case I missed his point, Grevioux was kind enough to repeat himself, yet again, just to drive his point home. Keep in mind that this was the opening splash page; when you can’t get past page 1 without an error you have to wonder if any of the people producing this comic gave a crap about their work.
As for the story, the Anti-man continues his tirade about how people have been victimized forever by society and its prejudices, and uses that as justification to uniformly kill the seemingly-endless victims along with the seemingly-endless victimizers, because of course that would be the humane and righteous thing to do. And with the threat sufficiently explained, we cut over to the gathered heroes to begin the real story of the issue. At heart, this issue tells what happens after the Avengers and Reed Richards bring the Blue Marvel out of retirement to defeat the Anti-man because he’s the only person powerful enough to do it (issues 1 – 4), then the Avengers decide that the Blue Marvel’s plan is too dangerous and send the next several pages fighting the Blue Marvel to stop HIM from destroying the world (explaining that they, the Avengers actually are able to stop the Anti-man on their own), before deciding for no reason that the Blue Marvel’s plan was sound and then following his lead to defeat the Anti-man. The fight with the Anti-man takes up about ten pages of this issue; the fight between the Avengers and Blue Marvel is 8 pages (the Avengers defeat Blue Marvel, by the way), and the rest of the pages are reserved for bizarre proclamations, speeches, and an “exploration” of the relationship between the Marvel and his wife. As for the wife, she dies (spoiler!) after deciding, for no apparent reason, to run across town in order to get into the middle of the raging and explosive superhero battle that is destroying the city of
Broome’s art is reminiscent of Mad Magazine parody stories, with caricature-like exaggerated anatomy and expressions. Other weird things happen which left me wondering if they were a result of mistakes in Grevioux’s script or random “choices” by Broome. For example, Wonderman’s costume changes halfway through the story from the “W” suit to the safari jacket, and the She Hulk randomly joins the team halfway through without explanation. Did Broome draw this in and leave Grevioux to adjust his story to avoid the expense of a redraw, or was this just another gaff in the original script? And where was Alejandro Arbona in this mess? For a self-produced indy comic book this might have been acceptable, but for a product from Marvel comics this was pure amateur hour. And at $3.99 a pop I’m amazed it was ever published (or that my store even ordered issue 5 – I dropped it from my pull list after issue #2 and bought the last three issues off the rack).
Now here’s the bad news – the Blue Marvel didn’t die at the end, or lose his powers. So let’s all pray together that unless a skilled writer has a real point for using him some day that he never rears his pointless head again!
Art: 1 - Poor
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While I don’t feel like this issue was as good as the ones before it, I enjoyed the issue and the series as a whole.
I am baffled as to why, if you dropped it from your pull list, you kept buying it since your other reviews were equally negative.
Mainly curiosity. The series was set in Marvel continuity at the time that it launched (although the larger setting moved on to Dark Reign shortly after), and I was interested to see how it would conclude. At a certain point I actually became fascinated by the degree of carelessness shown in the execution of the story, and I was also compelled to see if Grevioux would show any maturation as a writer in his approach to the material (which can be difficult to present in a way that doesn’t come across like a public service announcement). Unfortunately, rght to very end, I never saw any improvement in the author’s writing skills, and the messaging was equally flat and undevelopment by issue 5 as it was in issue 1. As I wrote previously, the serious message was never delivered skillfully enough to offer either meaningful insight or a really entertaining story. For me, the entertainment came from my own reaction to the remarkably poor quality of the material. You can go through any issue in this series and find scenes which break from the continuity of prior scenes, lines of dialogue that don’t match the conversation, etc. I haven’t seen anyone provide a positive explanation/review of what was good about this comic and I’m kind of curious to know what people that liked it (for something other than "ironic" reasons) took away from the series, or what they found entertaining about the story or characters.