Red She-Hulk #67 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (Writer), Carlo Pagulayan, Patrick Olliffe, Wellington Alves (Artists), Guy Major (Colorist)

The Story: Betty, Aaron, Jennifer and Man-Thing deals with the Echelon soldiers and gets to know about the order of the Shield with Nikola Tesla.

The Review: What a pity.

It’s always hard to see a title go, to see that despite all their efforts, the creators could not make the book sell enough to warrant a continuation. God knows that in this market we have seen a lot of cancellation on splendid titles, with the likes of Winter Soldier and Dial H being taken away because sales were low. It’s never a good thing to see such things happen, but there are also worse things that can happen to books that are cancelled. One of these, unfortunately, is to have an unfitting an unrewarding conclusion.

I am sad to say that this is the case here as even though Jeff Parker tries his very best to give us a grand finale and to resolve every plot points he had seeded in his book, he does not succeed. What gives this impression would be the fact that he tries to conclude too many elements at the same time, which gives the issue a very rushed feeling as the action jumbles a bit chaotically, not letting the reader assimilate everything that happens at a pace that feels satisfactory.

Red She-Hulk #62 – Review

By: Jeff Parker (Writer), Carlo Pagulayan, Wellington Alves (Artists), Val Staples (Colorist)

The Story: Betty explains how she got so much information on the potential disaster of military meta-humans and also encounters a cell of metahumans out to get her.

The Review: This is more like it. Although the series had suffered a bit with the absence of the titular character in the first issues of the re-titling of this book, the previous issue had remedied this problem a bit. This issue does it even further, giving us more of Betty Ross as a character.

Indeed, Machine Man is pushed a bit aside for this issue as most of the action and dialogue are centered on Betty Ross, both as her human person and as the Red She-Hulk. As the first page opens us on a scene explaining just how Betty met Nikola Tesla (the same one from S.H.I.E.L.D), we get much more characterization from her. Taking some part of Matt Fraction and Greg Pak previous versions of the character, Jeff Parker adds some more layers to her and what could make her go angry. It would make some sense of course that she’d become much more headstrong now that she knows she has the power of a Hulk, considering how much she had suffered with all the things people with that kind of power has done to her. Jeff Parker version of the character plays her like this, while still making her a good and interesting heroine, which is something I commend him for.

S.H.I.E.L.D. #4 – Review

By: Jonathan Hickman (writer), Dustin Weaver (artist), Sonia Oback, Rachelle Rosenberg, Christina Strain (colorists)

The Story: Man, I am experience some major crazy déjà vu right now.

The Review: Ten months ago, when I did my first review for this series, I felt pretty gung-ho about the type of story Hickman had to tell, and was confident in the direction he planned to take it.  But with each issue that came down the pike, my interest grew more listless as the plot seemed to have no motivation to wrap itself up.  I’d hate to be confrontational, but does anyone else think it’s a tad ridiculous for a story arc to take over a year to finish?

The crazy part is we’re still not actually at the finish line just yet.  This issue has Leonid et al traveling through time to confront Newton at the end of the world—three times.  By which I mean the gang uses the Human Machine to arrive simultaneously in three completely different possibilities of the future: one where human civilization has given way to the natural kingdom, one where technological utopia has been reached, and one that is merely a barren wasteland.

An interesting sequence, but with a fatal flaw: besides the difference in settings, the chain of action remains almost completely the same and the dialogue is only nominally altered by Hickman’s usual dose of grandiose wordage (“The next step.  The arc of ascendency.  The feedback loop.  Tomorrow’s tomorrow.”).  Sure, it makes a clear point about the immutability of human nature, but that doesn’t make it more exciting to read.

Nor does any of it advance the story in any significant way.  It almost feels like an exercise for how long Hickman can drag out an event before he moves on to the next.  It was just two issues ago that Newton fled from his battle versus the motley S.H.I.E.L.D. gang, and here they simply pick up where they left off with no real enlightening exchange—which kind of makes it seem like they all traveled to the end of the world for a change in scenery.

S.H.I.E.L.D. #3 – Review

By: Jonathan Hickman (writer), Dustin Weaver (artist), Sonia Oback (colorist)

The Story: The property rates are just gonna plummet after this, aren’t they?

The Review: The pace of release for this series has just gotten into joke territory, hasn’t it?  Two months between issues is simply way too long.  When you take a step back and look at the figures, it means that in one year, the title releases six issues, about the length of a single story arc.  Unless that arc is completely groundbreaking and/or stellar, there is almost no way such a title can expect long term success or pull with its audience.

Unfortunately, this story arc (which basically continues the plot from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s last volume, crazy as it sounds) has been neither groundbreaking nor stellar.  While it certainly boasts a few ostensibly far-reaching, intellectual ideas, they’ve all relied on vagaries and innuendo to promote themselves.  Not to dismiss the title’s concepts entirely, but at the end of the day, it’s just your usual secret society power plays with a dose of sci-fi and philosophy thrown in.

None of that is enough to keep your interest vested in the long, dry periods between issues, especially when Hickman insists on emphasizing the same points over and over: da Vinci and Newton in a war of ideas; Leonid stalling between them; Howard Stark, Nathaniel Richards, and Night Machine hanging around; and Michelangelo taking it all in with a smirk—in the buff.  This has been the status quo for nearly the last year, which is a major problem by any standard.

A comic that chooses to go without text is a very artsy, ambitious conceit, but that means the story has to have such substance that words aren’t necessary.  In this case, it feels more like the substance is so formulaic and straightforward that words would only be redundant.  After all, with a mad Celestial rampaging around the Immortal City, you essentially have a fancier, more cosmically driven Godzilla flick, and we all know how that goes.

For all the craziness that goes on, it only reveals that Celestials, shockingly enough, are a bugger to kill.  Don’t expect to learn anything about what drives the Celestial forward or why it’s after Newton.  Nonsense math started this, and nonsense math (courtesy of Michelangelo) ends it.  As usual, it all has the gloss of high-concept sophistication, but no real meat to chew on, so the story doesn’t go much of anywhere.

S.H.I.E.L.D. #2 – Review

By: Jonathan Hickman (writer), Dustin Weaver (artist), Sonia Oback (colorist)

The Story: Genius white men…and other sorry excuses for the state of the world!

The Review: In ordinary circumstances, S.H.I.E.L.D. would be the kind of title I’d fallen hopelessly in love with by now; it has fresh ideas, remarkable craft, rounded characters, and some gorgeous art.  Instead I find myself surprisingly nonplussed by the series.  I appreciate and respect the kind of story it wants to tell, but it just hasn’t done much to get me invested.

Maybe it’s the highly cerebral nature of the title.  The whole storyline so far, after all, deals with a literal war of ideas, the smartest people in history giving way to violence strictly to defend their principles, which, I suppose, if you’re going to war over anything, it might as well be your dearly held beliefs.  While the ideas at stake (determinism vs. fatalism, hope vs. resignation) do have a certain intellectual appeal, it’s no surprise they do little to capture your heart.

Then, too, the story has proceeded at a horrendously plodding pace.  Forget the fact they labeled this issue #2.  We all know this is really the eighth issue of the series, and considering this title launched June of last year, well—that rate isn’t great, to say the least.  And even had all eight issues been released on time, that doesn’t change the minimal advances the plot has made.

The first time I reviewed S.H.I.E.L.D. (half a year ago, if you can believe it), you had Newton and da Vinci duking it out in the Immortal City, with Leonid standing by.  Now, two chapters later (three, if you count the “infinity” issue), we’ve only just started our way to a resolution.  Hickman has filled the yawning gaps between important moments with a lot of expository, conceptual material, but again, it’s intriguing in an academic sort of way, but hardly engaging.