Earth Two #8 – Review

By: James Robinson (story), Yildiray Cinar (pencils), Ryan Winn & Ruy José (inks), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your frenemies dead.

The Review: All writers, even the very best, have their weaknesses.  Half of what Grant Morrison writes is just plain confusing; Geoff Johns rarely strives for intelligence in his work; and Brian Michael Bendis tends to forget that he’s not being paid by the number of each character’s lines.  Robinson has issues focus; looking at his body of work, you’ll notice he struggles with dispersing attention equally and keeping on point—or getting to it altogether.

That’s probably why he leans towards solo adventures and two-person scenes (maxing out at three, on the condition that the third character only interjects once in a while), where he excels.  This might also explain why his work on ensemble titles (see Justice League of America and Cry for Justice) were so terribly underwhelming.  He just doesn’t have much of a knack giving each character their due all at once.