RANN THANAGAR HOLY WAR #8 (OF 8)
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Size: pages
Price: 3.50
This review contains spoilers, click here to read
Since this is the last issue of the mini-series, I’ll review the whole thing in case anybody out there is thinking of picking up the trade. Bear in mind the series is actually ten issues, not eight, since it includes the single issue Adam Strange and Hawkman specials.
Jim Starlin weaves a story of DC’s cosmic heroes, but it’s a far cry from Marvel’s Annihilation wave. Basically, the series revolves around two warring religious factions, the
Look, there’s quite a few things about this series that irked me:
- First, the main villain: Synnar the Demiurge, isn’t all that interesting. Visually dull, Synnar spends plenty of time pontificating but doesn’t do much. In fact, reading the banter between Synnar and his henchman, Deacon Dark, it’s just like re-reading Starlin’s previous work with Thanos and Death … at its most dull.
- By comparison, Starlin gives one of DC’s more interesting characters, Animal Man, the short shrift. Poor Buddy’s lucky to get in a word balloon an issue. It’s a shame because Buddy would have made an ideal foil to all the cosmic happenings. He also left the printed page in his own series and met his creator, then series writer Grant Morrison. That could have made for a fun conversation: SYNNAR: I am the spawn of the Creator, the Demiurge. ANIMAL MAN: Oh crap. It’s Morrison’s kid!
- You would think with Synnar hogging panel after panel, the leader of the other side of the Holy War, Lady Styx, would get some much needed development.
- Synnar apparently has a history in the DCU. Starlin takes pains to point its out to us as Max mentions fighting him on Hardcore Station and there’s splash pages of Synnar duking it out against the JLA and the Spectre. Around issue six or seven, I was actually curious enough to check out his previous appearances by DC can’t be bothered with a single footnote so … who knows, maybe Starlin just made it all up.
- The Hawkman Special. Oh … frack… what the hell were they thinking? Post-crisis Hawkman is a continuity nightmare that was seemingly unsolvable. Many writers tried to make sense of it, but inevitably it only seemed to get worse. All seemed lost as Hawkman was purposely dispatched to comic book Limbo … where he probably whould have stayed … if not for continuity master Geoff Johns. Johns comes along and does the impossible: untangles Hawkman’s origin, creates an incredibly cool back-story and parlays that storyline a successful ongoing series (until Chaykin screwed the book like a super-powered drill-bit … but I digress …). Anywho, apparently all that was not good enough for DC head honcho Dan Didio who asked Starlin to streamline (read undo) John’s work and give Hawkman … a new origin. The special is grand failure which isn’t even interesting on its own: the plot being pages of clunky conversation between Hawkman and Synnar. Hopefully, this book will simply be forgotten.
(Synnar does tell us Hawkman is one of a group of characters called the “Aberrant Six;” apparently these are all characters who got screwed during relaunch – so add Wonder Woman, Bart Allen (Flash), and Supergirl to that list.)
- Anywho, and here’s a major spoiler, as it turns out, doing nothing is exactly Synnar’s plan. He entices the heroes to blow up his current Thanos-esque body so he can possess an even stronger form – in this case the Weird -- at the end of mini-series. And that’s it. The mini- ends there with a big “to be continued.” Weak that we don’t come out with even a minimal resolution.
Art: 4 - Very Good
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