HAUNT #2
What did the
iFanboy
community think?
Pulls
Size: pages
Price: 2.99
Robert Kirkman is a master of turning cliche’s on their head. Invincible is chock full of superheroey cliches that Kirkman blends into one of the best told comics in the genre. Same goes for Walking Dead, which is a non-stop horror cliche which never stope catching you off guard with its brutal humanity. Even Kirkman’s Marvel titles have been exceptionally well-paced.
So I find it really sad that when he’s teamed up with talented people like Ottley and Macfarlane, he flounders into a mudpit of bad cliche characters, that he can’t seem to put in an interesting concept. And that’s not to say his floundering does any disservice to the art. Visually, the book is a mess, too. Spawner-Man is so derivative of Macfarlane’s two most famous characters, it’s shameful. If the artist was someone other than himself, he could probably sue them for copyright infringement. I mean, there’s having your own style, and then there’s not being creative enough to make your characters look different. This is a creativity issue.
Were this a project by a new writer/artist ream, or people I wasn’t familiar with, I might give it a few more issues to see if they stepped up their game, but this is so far beneath what I expect from Kirkman and Ottley (I really haven’t expected anything good from Macfarlane since the mid 90s), that I just don’t think it can be salvaged.
Art: 2 - Average
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I don’t know if the name "Spawner-Man" existed before this review, but it should definitely be the official nickname.
I quite like "Spider-Spawn" too.
@slockhart & deadspace: I’m fairly certain I heard Spawnerman from someone else. I’ve also heard Spider-Spawn. A lot of customers seemed unimpressed wiith the first issue.
I can’t help but agree with your take on the character…..he has Spawns face and is basically Spider-man combined a little with Venom or Carnage…..I’m actually kind of liking the story but I think the characters obvious simliarities to McFarlane’s past characters is taking away from the writing a little bit.
@cubman: It’s not that the story is terrible. My problem is that it’s terrible for Kirkman. Which may be a bit unfair. The man is writing several books at once, and most of them are excellent. But it sets the bar so high, that I’m not willing to give him as much breathing room as I’d give another writer.
Oh yeah I totally get that, I’m speaking more for myself that I think I could tollerate what is just a good story (far from great) if the character didn’t seem to be such a ripoff. And I have not read a whole lot of Kirkman’s other work so I don’t have a lot to compare it to. I think for me I’m more dissapointed that something that took so long to get done and was so highly anticipated isn’t completely "wowing" me.