Flashpoint: Emperor Aquaman #3 – Review

By: Tony Bedard (writer), Vicente Cifuentes (artist), Diana Egea (inker), Kyle Ritter (colorist)

The Story: I know I killed your wife, but do you have to act like such a jerk?

The Review: We’ve known for a while now that Prince Orm of Atlantis and Penthesilea of the Amazons have worked together since day one (see Flashpoint: Wonder Woman and the Furies #1) to raise Cain between their peoples.  Even though it’s never been explicitly stated, you can pretty much deduce, especially given Orm’s character history, that power-lust motivates their partnership to some degree, but how they came to work together still remains a mystery.

Well, hold on to your britches, because here comes a spoiler that will blow your mind.  As Diana reveals to Arthur, “…[Orm’s] not dead!  It’s worse…I walked in on your brother and my aunt Penthesilea kissing!”  Bedard’s love for melodrama defeats whatever impact this “revelation” can have (which is slim to begin with), but worse, it just makes the characters look silly.  Their overblown disbelief (Arthur: “That’s…no…that’s just not—”) makes them sound like kids who can’t believe their parents made out because it’s just plain icky.

Once you get over your violent spasm of eye-rolling, you’ll also have to take issue with the execution of this scene.  It feels very soapy with its fraught fact drop and lack of substantiation.  Surely this merits a flashback of some kind, especially since it changes the entire flow of the story now that the real villains stand revealed.  Possibly we’ll get to see Orm and Penthesilea’s lip-locking in the next issue of F:WWATF, but that just seems like poor editorial planning.

Flashpoint: Emperor Aquaman #2 – Review

By: Tony Bedard (writer), Vicente Cifuentes (artist), Diana Egea (inker), Kyle Ritter (colorist)

The Story: Think Little Mermaid, but with a lot more drama and stabbing.

The Review: In almost every kind of traditional storytelling, a strong narrator is essential to detailing a scene and giving us insight into the characters’ minds.  In a visual medium like comics, since the art pretty much takes over most of the expository duties, narration can actually become cumbersome and redundant, especially with a strong artist on hand.  In this case, the narrative must frame the scene, highlighting details the art and dialogue wouldn’t by themselves.

In this issue, Bedard demonstrates the merit in the old adage, “Less is more,” only he does so by showing what a drag excessive narration can be.  Almost at no point does his voice help the scene; oftentimes, it just tinges everything with melodrama (“History is littered with the corpses of the complacent.”), and it almost always reiterates the facts that are in plain sight to you.  Not to take it personally, but I find that kind of storytelling almost patronizing.

Perhaps Bedard felt pressed for time so he found it easier to just gloss over certain details rather than take the time to show them, but by doing so, he actually undermines the impact of his own story.  If he really wanted to convince us that “Arthur Curry returned to the deep too young to understand the virtues his father had tried to teach: patience, kindness, humility,” then Bedard should’ve given us more scenes of Tom trying to teach his son exactly those things.