Brilliant #4 – Review

By: Brian Michael Bendis (writer), Mark Bagley (pencils), Joe Rubinstein (inks), Nick Filardi (colors), and Chris Eliopoulos (letters)

The Story:  Super-powers are suddenly very public as Amadeus rips through police officers and his friends wind up in interrogation rooms.

The Review:  Bendis  has often faced ire from readers for decompression.  Given this, it feels odd to criticize this issue of Brilliant for moving too fast, but that’s what I’m finding myself doing.  Simply put, in four issues, things have happened too quickly.  Bendis is essentially having huge things occur that are generally the sorts of things that happen 20 issues or so into a run, not by issue 4.  As a result, these events have very little emotional impact and pack nowhere near the punch that they should.

The problem is that with only 3 prior issues, we’re not invested enough in these characters to truly care when big things happen to them.  We’re unphased by gigantic shake-ups to the status-quo because, well, we hadn’t even really settled into that prior status quo.