First Wave #6 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (writer), Rags Morales (penciller), Rick Bryant & Phil Winslade (inker), Nei Ruffino (colorist)

The Story: If you happen to be fighting giant robots and dinosaurs on a floating city in the middle of a tsunami, you’ll get pretty down too.

The Review: Figuring out the ending to any kind of story is probably the toughest part of writing.  There’s an urge to neatly wrap it all up with a bow on top, but that’s not always possible.  Some endings take time to come together, making it rough for comic book miniseries.  Since there’s a definite cap to their space and deadline for their completion, they don’t have the luxury of letting the story meander along until it kind of finishes itself.

This last issue of First Wave definitely seems like a spare issue or two would have helped out a lot in pulling all its plot threads together in a tighter way.  Azzarello does his best with what he’s got, but the pace still feels rushed, almost furiously cobbled together.  Even to the very end, he introduces twists which never pan out—the serum that turns blood into gold, for example—which indicates he has a much grander vision in mind that what he ends up with.

Certainly a lot of the more emotional, pontificating scenes need more grounding to sell.  Anton Colossi’s childish breakdown would be more convincing had we seen more signs of his instability beyond a weird, but not totally off-putting devotion to his mother.  But his mad ravings are kind of an eye-roller: “I am sooooo [sic] done hearing can’t, when I can do any damned thing I want!”  You’re really left with the sense of him as an insignificant lunatic.