Chaos War: Chaos King #1 – Review

By: Brandon Montclare (writer), Michael William Kaluta (art), Brad Anderson, Nathan Eyring & Jim Charlampidis (colors), Jared Fletcher (letters) & Mark Paniccia (editor)

The Story: The Chaos King turns his sights on new targets including Zenn-la, Earth & the devil himself.

What’s Good: Holy cow can Mr. Kaluta draw!  That isn’t exactly a news flash, but I’d had a bad experience with my Chaos War tie-in last week and had considered avoiding the tie-ins this week until I saw that Kaluta was drawing this issue.  With his name attached, I almost cease to care what the story is because I’m willing to plunk down my $3.99 to buy it as a picture book.  There aren’t many artists who hit that level of excellence and virtually none who work in modern monthly comics (JH Williams, III is the closest).

This story is very much written to Kaluta’s strengths.  He really excels at large spreads showing godly or demonic images where you have swirling mists or flames and angels/demons swooping about.  I can’t emphasize enough how visually stunning the comic is.  This review is actually taking an overly long time to write because I keep flipping through the issue again to marvel at the pretty pictures.  Just buy it!

The story is almost incidental (for me).  But, it does what event tie-ins should.  It adds extra flavor to the event without being required reading.  The second and third parts of the story where the Chaos King encounters Impossible Man (which is an interesting concept) and the devil are much stronger than the first chapter.

Chaos War #1 – Review

By: Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente (writers), Khoi Pham (penciller), Tom Palmer (inker), Simon Bowland (letterer)

The Story: Hercules returns from a death that never really happened, gets made fun of by the heroes of the Marvel U, fights with them needlessly and then uses his apparent semi-omnipotence to bring them along to fight generic monsters.

What’s Good: Pham and Palmer put some pretty attractive art onto the page. Pham’s got the creativity to make the alien come alive and I’ve always thought that Palmer makes any artist’s work look more fluid. They both create some nice textured effects, especially in the opening scene with the weird backgrounds of Nightmare’s realm. King Chaos’s appearance is very dynamic and Nightmare’s emotive face is almost all we need to tell the story. I’ve never had strong feelings about letterers before, but I really feel this issue would have worked better if Bowland had used invisible ink for this issue; that would have kept the writing from sinking this battleship.