By: Jeff Parker (writer), Gabriel Hardman (artist), Bettie Breitweiser (colorist), Ed Dukeshire (letters), Jake Thomas (assistant editor) & Mark Paniccia (editor)
The Story: Red Hulk visits the old family farm and Omegex finally strikes.
What’s Good: While this issue isn’t perfect, it has a lot of goodies. For one thing, it features the top-shelf art team of Gabriel Hardman & Bettie Breitweiser. Everything about Hardman’s artwork is impressive. His characters are strong and vital presences on the page and he puts a lot of effort into the barns, trucks, airplanes, etc. It’s really something to behold, but one other thing to praise about Hardman is page layouts. If you’ve ever gotten bored by a comic that featured almost nothing but pages full of 4-5 full-width rectangular panels, you will appreciate this. Every page is laid out a little differently and Hardman uses the full page of layout elements to keep it fresh for us.
Bettie Breitweiser is simply my favorite Marvel colorist right now. The pages just look stunning and while I (honestly) lack the vocabulary to do her work justice, her work has really inspired me to learn more about color theory. So there’s that. In the past, I had called her colors more muted, but I think the big-boy word for that is that he colors are less “saturated”. She also has a very strong sense of shading and her colors are never at odds with Hardman’s inking (Hardman has a wonderful sense of shading too). These two are a great team-up.
As for the story, well, it has some good stuff too. I love the fact that Rulk’s best friend is a life-model decoy named Anne. In a way it seems weird that this gruff man (whether he is Rulk or General Thunderbolt Ross) would be buddies with a 20-something woman, but she probably reminds him of his daughter. Over the last ~15 issues, Parker has turned Anne into a character who we care about without resorting to any annoying tricks like a special issue devoted to Anne; he’s done it all within the context of his story.
We also get the much-anticipated attack of Omegex who is this world-killing robot who The Watcher sicced on Rulk issues ago. Parker has been teasing us about this eventual conflict for a long time (~10 issues?) and that sort of build up is the kind of thing that made comics great during their hey-day in the 1980’s before comic storytelling got screwed up by the trade paperback. If Parker introduced Omegex for a typical 6-issue story arc, Omegex would have no weight. He’d just be some new chump for Rulk to smash since Omegex is new and we’d have no reason to care about him. But, because Parker has shown us snippets of Omegex over the last year this confrontation seems BIG. Nice job, Jeff Parker.
What’s Not So Good: I know why Parker did it this way, but the issue is a little slow paced until Omegex makes his appearance. I just usually expect a little more action from a Jeff Parker comic.
The other thing I chuckled at was how Omegex makes his appearance. Due to the evil that is comic solicits, we’ve known for months that this was the issue where the showdown with Omegex would begin. We also get a pretty good spoiler on the cover where we see a picture of Omegex and there is the banner text “Tremble at OMEGEX: The Walking Apocalypse!!!”. So, Parker’s interesting strategy of having Omegex just kinda hiding in the corner of Rulk’s old barn is kinda ruined. The teasers and the storytelling method just don’t really gel. IF you could take away all the spoilers (the solicits, the banner text, etc.) and just have that panel where Rulk and Anne just wonder “What’s that big looming object in the corner of the barn??” the reader would have a real “Oh shit!” moment. But, since the appearance was spoiled by Marvel, I was left to fixate on why a world-killer robot would hide in a barn. Granted, I don’t have a better solution since having Omegex just jet down to the surface and proclaim that he is there to kill Rulk would have been pretty corny. So, maybe Parker just gets points for trying something very original and it not quite working perfectly. That’s how experimentation goes, so Parker should probably get an atta-boy even for part of this issue that wasn’t great.
Conclusion: Kinda a quiet issue that allows the art to shine. You won’t find better art anywhere in comics and that includes the “masters” like JH Williams and Darwyn Cooke who grace us with art once per year (whereas Hardman and Breitweiser are doing it monthly). Jeff Parker should get to teach a breakout session at the next Marvel retreat on how to introduce new characters.
Grade: B+
-Dean Stell
Grade
Conclusion