Grevioux seems as indifferent to his plot as he does to his characters in this latest installment of the Blue Marvel.  Once again the characters are interchangeable ciphers delivering monologues about the injustice and irrationality of racism and prejudice, and we have another moment where a character “looks” directly at the reader and poses a moral dilemma, further reinforcing the fact that this is really just the author’s attempt to convey his thoughts about racism through the vehicle of a poorly constructed narrative.  I don’t mind having these underlying concepts woven into an entertaining or challenging story, and I think that there’s some merit to doing so.  Other more experience writers have done it and I’ve enjoyed their stories and their points.  Unfortunately, Grevioux demonstrates no skill in weaving his moral dilemma into a well layered story and the complete package suffers for it.  The art by Broome is equally uneven and further detracts from the experience (e.g. if the story isn’t good to read it could at least be pretty to look at).

It’s unusual for a 5 issue limited series to have significant continuity problems – it should be easy for an author to remember what he wrote just one issue ago, but this series has had a hard time maintaining continuity between scenes in a single issue.  In this issue we finally get the Blue Marvel’s origin story, which predictably is the origin story of the villain as well.  Here we discover that the villain and Adam (and their wives) were long time friends before they became super-powered people through an accident.  Problem?  Last issue we learned that Adam’s wife was a spy assigned to watch him BECAUSE he had superpowers.  Oops.

I know that Grevioux can do better; his New Warriors work is more coherent and well considered, but with this story he seems so overwhelmed by his desire to make a moral point that he’s neglecting the story.  Next issue I suspect that we’ll see the final showdown between Adam and the Antiman, who’s powers will end up either destroying them both (but not before a tearful reconciliation between Adam and his wife), or their powers will end up combining to cure both of them and leave them as baseline humans free to resume their lives in harmony.  Sigh.

This series just reminds how well crafted The Truth and The Sentry mini-series really were…