Rating: WARTY!
Art work: Jacob Wyatt and Adrian Alphona
Colors: Ian Herring
Today is the first of July. It marks the end of my year of living dangerously, wherein I published two reviews per day, 365 consecutive days, didn't miss a day! I am so glad that's over! It was a great discipline, though, which hopefully gave me a better work ethic for creative writing.
The advent of July also marks a change in that I'm through with posting book cover images with my reviews. This blog is about writing, and unless you self-publish, the cover has nothing to do with the author and typically nothing to do with the story either, so why indulge Big Publishing™? Yeah, kids books and graphic novels are perhaps exceptions, but I don't do that many of those compared with regular chapter books I review. Besides, covers change too, so as soon as you post your image, it's likely obsolete. Enough already! I'm writing about the writing from now on. If you want pretty pictures try Pinterest or DeviantArt.
So for fun, I'm starting out this month with a Smack-Down! Yeah! I was in the library a few days ago and they had a display of literature about women or written by women, and part of the display was a set of graphic novels about female super heroes or other characters, and they happened to have Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel sitting side-by-side, so I immediately thought, let's put 'em in the cage together and see who rings whose bell.
The Ms Marvel graphic novel is very much written - and indeed illustrated - for juvenile readers. The first thing to happen after the appallingly boxy-looking Wolverine (really, he looked like a rectangle with arms and legs tacked on) shows up is that the kid hero gets a pet sidekick. Yawn. This dog is a pit bull variety of the Bulldog kind, which has a weird antenna sticking out of its head which looks like it's some sort of homage to Meowth, and no one remarks upon it - at least not initially. The dog can teleport which is conveniently just what Ms Marvel needs right then.
The kid that Wolverine and Ms Marvel rescue is in a coma. This kid was actually on her way to the Jean Grey institute when she was abducted, yet no one thinks that Prof X ought to see if he can get into her mind and discover what happened....
Lettering had randomly bolded words. Yuk! I have no time for letterers. On the plus side, this was a Muslim super hero: Kamala Khan is originally from Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan. the problem was that she was insultingly stereotyped as was her religion. Her mentor was called Abdullah, because you know that all Muslims are named Abdul or Abdullah, right?
I did like the magazine name: Pedantic Monthly. That was inspired, but it was about the only amusing thing in this book. The weird bird-man hybrid who plays a lackluster villain is concerned about global warming, and so, in a plot ripped straight from The Matrix, abducts children to use their bio-electricity and body heat as batteries for his devices - not one of which seems to be doing anything about global warming.
In short, this story was brain-dead and beneath Wilson's skills, and the art work godawful. Plus some of the cutesy layout was seriously confusing. On one occasion there was a full page spread where Ms and Wolvie were climbing up through a sewer, but it was hard to tell if it should be read up or down. I ran into problems both ways. I finally decided that up from the bottom was the intended direction, but it still made less than sufficient sense! I can't recommend this at all. It smacked itself down!
