By: Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente (writers), Khoi Pham (penciller), Tom Palmer (inker), Simon Bowland (letterer)
The Story: Hercules returns from a death that never really happened, gets made fun of by the heroes of the Marvel U, fights with them needlessly and then uses his apparent semi-omnipotence to bring them along to fight generic monsters.
What’s Good: Pham and Palmer put some pretty attractive art onto the page. Pham’s got the creativity to make the alien come alive and I’ve always thought that Palmer makes any artist’s work look more fluid. They both create some nice textured effects, especially in the opening scene with the weird backgrounds of Nightmare’s realm. King Chaos’s appearance is very dynamic and Nightmare’s emotive face is almost all we need to tell the story. I’ve never had strong feelings about letterers before, but I really feel this issue would have worked better if Bowland had used invisible ink for this issue; that would have kept the writing from sinking this battleship.
What’s Not So Good: The event bigger than the Infinity Gauntlet and more cosmic than Annihilation! Yeah, right. I was very disappointed in the writing. I picked this book up hoping for either (1) cosmic adventures of larger-than-life heroes in tremendous peril or (2) some good Hercules-based laughs. It delivered neither of these things. The entire pantheon of heroes in the Marvel Universe were treating the arrival of the harbinger of doom like the arrival of picture day in high school, making fun of each other and ridiculing Hercules (check out the line about Hercules and beer and Costco). The villain didn’t help matters: just another cackling villain (a) I’ve never heard of, (b) with a dumb name, (c) in a headdress that didn’t make the grade in Kirby’s Eternals. Iron Man’s brief meta-fictional comments didn’t improve anything either; they just told the reader that neither the writer nor the characters are even paying lip service to death anymore, which again really blew any weight this thin story might have had.
Maybe Pak and Van Lente were going for a redemption arc for Herc, and so needed to bring him down a notch first, to make the redemption that much better? Maybe, but the belittling of the hero made me cease to take Hercules seriously, and therefore the whole danger thing was out the window. Could Pak and Van Lente have been going for funny? If so, then the humor flopped so badly, it didn’t occur to me for a while that this was a real attempt at humor.
Lastly on the writing, I didn’t feel this was anyone’s story. We were never seriously in anyone’s head or point of view. I couldn’t latch onto Herc, who was knocking down straw enemies and friends without motivation (even his disorientation wasn’t done in a way that could make me relate). I was never around any of the other heroes long enough to care about them. Amadeus might have been the core of the story if not for his flippant, unfunny tone about being omnipotent. Truth be told, the person I most sympathized with was Nightmare: (a) he hurt the most in this story and (b) we saw his pain. It’s really sad when the emotional weight of the story rests in a throwaway prologue.
Conclusion: This is two weeks in a row that Marvel has really made me wish I hadn’t picked up a book. I certainly won’t go anywhere near this conceptual train wreck again.
Grade: D-
-DS Arsenault
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