Valkyrie #1 – Review

By: Bryan J.L. Glass (writer), Phil Winslade (artist), Veronica Gandini (colorist), Dave Lanphear (letterer)

The Story: Taking place between Avengers Disassembled and Secret Invasion, this story is about a woman called Valerie, who was murdered and resurrected minutes later as a confused Valkyrie. Then she fights Pile Driver.

What’s Good: I liked the lettering for Val’s inner monologue and… Well, that’s it. I’d really like my money and time back.

What’s Not So Good: This is the most disappointing comic book I’ve picked up since those Green Arrow issues around #21 and the Titans cross-over with Jericho. Cover to cover. I have more than a passing familiarity with Valkyrie, but even the first page synopsis (…the story so far…) confused me with not only obtuse sentences, but with grammatically poor and ambiguous writing. It got no better as the plot started moving. So Pile Driver tries to rape a girl, who throws herself off a balcony. She is resurrected as Valkyie by those paddles they use for heart attack guys. OK. I’ll spend my suspension of disbelief to buy that Val’s got some grudge against Pile Driver and that she’ll pick a suitable host to come back in. Thereafter, her memory problems, confused and cliché internal monologue, and reactions are all tepid and uninteresting. I’ve already seen it in other comics where the story was phoned in. Didn’t like it there either. I thought for a minute the story would pick up with Janet Van Dyne acting as some sort of symbolic fairy godmother, but her superficiality and faux-deep platitudes (and apparently quick mood changes) made her a detractor in a story that already wasn’t doing well. The ending, where Val catches up with Pile Driver, seems to make no sense from Pile Driver’s motivation, nor the coincidences that gave Val the info as to where he might be. Val’s character arc in all this (ie: what is she struggling with?) was muddy, unconvincing and poorly shown in the writing.

Artwise, Winslade left me cold. Character poses were superhero-weird without having the compensating superhero-dynamism. The fight with Pile Driver and its lead-up show these awkward and unnatural poses. The faces are pretty unappealing too. The conversation with Janet alone establishes this. Uggh. And I guess it was part of a writer-artist strategy to leave Val’s shirt ripped open/unbuttoned for 20 pages, to thereby increase the book’s attractiveness for pre-pubescent boys. Not only is this a cheap effort that signals that the creators themselves don’t have confidence in the material, but Val was so poorly drawn that I wished they’d just button her up.

Conclusion: (a) Marvel, I want my $3.99 back. (b) Thank you, Marvel, for making this just a one-shot.

Grade: What grade do we have below D? Never mind. I’ve wasted enough time on this already. I’m not looking it up. I’ll give is a D- and leave it at that.

-DS Arsenault