By: Greg Pak & Fred Van Lente (writers), Khoi Pham (pencils), Thomas Palmer (inks), Sunny Gho (colors) & Simon Bowland (letters)
The Story: The Chaos King continues his assault, taking on underworld as Herc tries to raise a squad of immortals to defend the universe.
What’s Good: There was just something wrong with Chaos War #1. If you were not following the overall Hercules story for the last couple of years, you felt a little like being at a cocktail party where you don’t know anyone and no one is really making an effort to include you in the conversation. BUT, after reading through this issue #2, you feel like you know everyone and that this is a party that you won’t mind hanging out at too much.
It was just a lot of fun seeing Herc trying to raise a team of gods to do battle with the Chaos King. Of course, he’s going to get Thor and that’s kinda fun because neither of them is the sharpest tool in the shed (moreso Herc). And there is a fun little scene of Venus trying to revive the fallen mortals by singing Bob Marley (“Get up, stand up…” it must be a LOT of fun to pick these slightly inappropriate songs for Venus). But from there the fun really begins as Herc starts using his new supergod powers to summon a raft of big-time powerful folks to help in his battle against the Chaos King and they’ll need it because the Chaos King has some serious firepower on his side too (as if he needs it). This issue just clicked in a way that the first one did not, so if you were really down on the first issue understand that you might want to give it another chance.
The art is in that neither good-nor-bad category. There are some good panels and some bad panels, but nothing is so good or so bad as to gush/rant about.
What’s Not So Good: It feels like this would have been a happier story if it could have been a “double-sized” first issue. From a skimming of websites that do “responsible” reviews, it doesn’t look like anyone loved Chaos War #1, and that is no way to start an event when Marvel has fourteen official tie in issues for the event. Perhaps if this was a $4.99 ~32 page first issue, it might have gone over better because the story is humming by the end of this issue whereas it was sucking wind at the end of issue #1. Just saying…
It also seems like a huge waste to have all the mortal heroes just flopped out in this issue. I guess that is driving home the “it’s up to the gods” theme, but what I hate, hate, hate is that these sorts of events have zero impact back in the mortal heroes regular books and that lessens the impact of seeing the X-Men and Fantastic Four laying comatose. It would be nice if Marvel editorial would do something to make all their myriad titles dance together.
Conclusion: If you didn’t like issue #1, but do generally like the godly characters of the Marvel U. or enjoy cosmic-scale action, this might be worth another look (at least the main event series). This wasn’t “awesome”, but it was good enough to warrant picking up the third issue. The tie-ins are probably a no-can-do at this point unless you really like a particular creator who works on one of those projects.
Grade: B-
– Dean Stell
Grade
Conclusion