Phantom Lady #4 – Review

By: Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (story), Cat Staggs (pencils), Tom Derenick (inks), Jason Wright (colors)

The Story: How do superheroes vent their sexual frustration?  By taking down mob bosses.

The Review: On the second day of my Property class, my professor told me that once we got more familiarity with the law, we’ll start seeing pop-up balloons, visible only to us, appear everywhere we go.  We’ll see a stalled car preventing someone from backing out of their parking space and a balloon will pop up: “False Imprisonment?”  A homeless person will squat on an empty lot: “Adverse Possession?”  That kind of thing.

I had one of those pop-up balloons reading this issue.  When Jen suggests that instead of risking lives (theirs and those of others) by amateurish vigilantism, they simply sneak into the Benders’ HQ and gather incriminating evidence, Dane protests, “None of that stuff would be admissible in court.”  Actually, it would, I believe (and if I’m wrong, that bodes ill for my prospects at passing my Criminal Procedure final today).  As far as I know, the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure would not apply to a private citizen, rather than a government official, who gathers incriminating evidence against a person.  But then, would you consider Dane and Jen as agents of the government?

Phantom Lady #3 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Cat Staggs (pencils), Tom Derenick (inks), Jason Wright (colors)

The Story: They may be fighting zombies, but at least they’re doing it on a yacht.

The Review: For the Walking Dead fans, what I’m about to say is akin to blasphemy, but I’m getting pretty sick of zombies or any of their facsimiles.  I don’t know what has suddenly propelled them into the popular zeitgeist, but whether they’re your traditional zombies in The Walking Dead or The New Deadwardians, or Black Lanterns and Third Army drones in Green Lantern, watching mindless, unkillable beings infect others has gotten quite tiresome.

Which is why the appearance of zombies in this issue, even temporary ones, drew a groan from me.  Funerella (still a horrible name) already has plenty of formidable powers to her credit, including accelerated molecular degradation and, apparently, imperviousness to being killed.  The ability to make lumbering undead from scratch just seems like a cheap way to generate distractions for Dane and Jen.  The fact that the zombies return to normal upon some unspecified circumstance makes you look at our heroes’ killing them in a more questionable light.

Freedom Fighters #9 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Travis Moore (penciller), Trevor Scott (inker), Allen Passalqua (colorist)

The Story: Well, that gives new meaning to “blow up” doll.

The Review: There’s no point in naming names, but when you consider the pretty significant number of terrible titles on the stands out there, you have to wonder at the cancellation of Freedom Fighters less than a year after it launched.  It may have been a hard sell from the start, but it really can’t be considered on the same quality level as the series that deliver—in fact, will continue to deliver soul-sucking reads month after month.

Considering the open-ended finale to this issue, Gray-Palmiotti may have planned the Fighters’ disbandment all along, and if that’s true, this should have been the opening story arc.  The whole plot with the Arcadians took way too long and tried way too hard to give an epic feel, but never really gave a sense of danger or a cohesive tone to the series.

This issue immediately opens with a high-stakes conflict for the group: newly decommissioned, how will they fight the good fight now?  It seems the question has lit a fire under the team, as they act way more gung-ho and unified than they did the last eight issues.  It’s good to see them backing each other up, especially where Human Bomb’s more fragile status is concerned.  Their interactions have a comfortable familiarity that’s been missing for a while now.

Another missing element has been character growth (beyond Stormy and Black Condor shacking up, I mean), and this issue dives well into that.  Black Condor using his unemployment period to tackle crime in his reservation not only fleshes out his background and offers some fun moments (how dumb do you have to be to make locker room talk about your captor’s girlfriend in front of him?), it also makes a fitting political statement about his culture—without banging it over your head with nonsensical diatribes, Gray-Palmiotti’s preferred method of opinionating.

Freedom Fighters #8 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Travis Moore (penciller), Trevor Scott (inker), Allen Passalaqua (colorist)

The Story: What does the spirit of America do when it’s angry?  It punches you in the face.

The Review: By all accounts, this is the third series (the first two being minis) featuring the Freedom Fighters and written by the Gray-Palmiotti team.  The minis both had the problem of starting strong, then having the story fall part toward the end.  You’d think with that kind of experience, Gray-Palmiotti would have a firm handle on executing their plotting by now.

As it turns out though, this first story arc winds down just as anticlimactically.

Uncle Sam’s reappearance should have heralded the team getting its act together and taking down the Jester in all-American style.  Instead, his teammates spend the issue KO’ed while Uncle Sam has to finish the job himself.  And despite being a metaphysical concept come to supernatural life, Sam doesn’t have much in the way of skills and powers except a terrific right hook.  It makes for a fairly repetitive fight sequence, that’s for sure.

It doesn’t help Uncle Sam and Jester punctuate their punches with babble about American ideology and politics.  Let’s face it—very few people in general have a firm grasp on political science or the implications of their political beliefs.  If I may be so bold to say it, comic-book writers and readers probably have even less.  Can comics be a medium for political discourse?  Sure.  Superhero comics, not so much—check out Law and the Multiverse for just some of the wacky ways superheroes fly in the face our already jittery laws.

Freedom Fighters #7 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Travis Moore (penciller), Walden Wong (inker), Allen Passalqua (colorist)

The Story: By the power of Paul Revere’s lantern, General Sherman’s sword, and the Arcadians’ helmet of war, I summon the spirit of America!

The Review: The sad truth is cancellations never have a direct relationship to the title’s quality.  Even if an ongoing series is awful, as long as it brings in good money, it’ll survive.  Cancellations only happen when a title doesn’t sell, whether it’s so infamously terrible, hardly anyone can stand it; so flavor-specific, its audience isn’t enough to support it; or so underexposed, it never got on its feet to start with.

Freedom Fighters honestly falls in the middle category.  As a title that enthusiastically embraces its “Rah-rah-America!” nature, it winds up very niche.  We live in an era in which most people aren’t much interested in everyday patriotism except for special occasions.  Comic book readers, being increasingly older, more intellectual individuals, are even less likely to take nationalism seriously, so this title can’t help but come across endearingly sincere, but inescapably silly.

Gray-Palmiotti also make their work harder by attempting to bring in actual politics to the story, which always risks messiness.  The more experience you have in real politics, the more you realize that it’s way more complex and rich than the divide between liberals and conservatives, security versus democracy, which gets played up here.  Being so oversimplified damages the title’s integrity: thoughtful readers dismiss it, naïve readers get misled by it.

Freedom Fighters #6 – Review

By: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Travis Moore (penciller), Trevor Scott (inker), Rob Schwager (colorist)

The Story: As it turns out, the Freedom Fighters discover, there may be some truth to the whole mutant sewer creatures thing.

The Review: With most superhero teams, writers claim from time to time that such-and-such character is the “heart” of the team—usually a few weeks before killing them off.  After the immediate shock and grief is over, the team usually ends up functioning much like it did before.  But Uncle Sam has been a staple of the Freedom Fighters for so long he truly their emotional center.  You really can’t imagine the team without that tall, lanky, bearded Yankee on their side.

So it’s been interesting seeing Gray and Palmiotti handle Uncle Sam’s absence from the Fighters.  The impact of his “death” kind of got lost at first, what with the team being forced to continue the mission at hand without him.  But with every issue, the team has lost direction, even under the capable leadership of Miss America, until now you’re just longing for Uncle Sam to come back and make everything all right somehow.

It’s great that Gray-Palmiotti are bringing back some of the sticky issues from their original Freedom Fighters miniseries.  After all, the team was formed by some abominably shady forces and for a time operated without much deference to justice or mercy.  Under Uncle Sam’s reformation, they’ve slowly made their way back to respectability, but their actions toward the Jailbreakers this issue show that they’re toeing the line to being ruthless operatives again.

The confrontation between Phantom Lady and Miss America hits all the right points, but there’s some confusion as to who’s to blame for what went down.  Looking back at those earlier scenes, it won’t occur to you Joan doesn’t try her best to be accommodating to their enemies.  In fact, since Stormy’s the one teleporting people to safety, it seems she’d be more responsible for whatever breach of integrity they might have made.  This vilifying of Miss America—especially her coercive attitude toward Doll Man at the end—just comes off a little sudden and forced.

Freedom Fighters #5 – Review

By Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (writers), Travis Moore (penciller), Trevor Scott (inker), Rob Schwager (colorist)

The Story: The Fighters discover metahuman convict escapees are tougher to deal with than they think, and the rumors regarding mutant creatures in sewer bottoms may have some credit.

The Review: The nonstop action continues as Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray gleefully toss the Freedom Fighters from one scene of chaos to another.  This time, however, the onslaught of narrative-hopping subsides as the masterminds behind the prison break are revealed.  In doing so, Palmiotti and Gray are slowly gelling together the various plotlines they’ve strung through past issues.

Palmiotti-Gray still run into problems with pacing.  Before, the story went all over the place at breakneck speed, never allowing any one scene to play itself out before leaping to the next.  This issue has the reverse problem; it drags its heels in one place for way too long and gets only a couple choice tidbits of new information out of it.  Sure, since it’s Palmiotti-Gray, there’ll probably be some huge payoff at the end of the road.  But in the meantime, it’s vital they offer some progress, either in developing the characters or giving some substance to the plot.

Sadly, even after all the troubles they’ve faced together, the personalities and dynamics among the Fighters still remain a big fat blank.  You really don’t know anything about who these heroes are beneath the costumes and political rhetoric.  Their dialogue mostly consists of the usual groaners of battle-quips or clichés (“All I see is a tough guy who likes to kick women,” and “It doesn’t have to work like this,” being prime examples—all in one panel).  None of these lines do much to give each character a distinctive personality; taken together, they all sound pretty much the same.

The characterization and dialogue of the Jailbreakers, the Fighters’ opponents, aren’t much better.  At least each Jailbreaker has a semi-specific kind of crazy to their talk.  But most of the time they keep rambling on and on about the injustice of being locked away for apparently no reason and experimented on with science and magic—well, alright, that is a pretty good subject to harp on.  But imagine them repeating the same talking points, panel after panel, page after page, either standing around or even in the midst of battle, for most of the issue.