Original Sin 8

Original Sin 8

Nick Fury attempts to fight off Dr. Midas, Oubliette, and the Mindless Ones Midas has in tow. Help arrives as his gathered team of investigators show up to take on the Mindless Ones has Fury chases Midas to The Watcher's body, where Midas hopes to gain all of the deceased's secrets and power. Fury admits that he was the one who killed The Watcher after all, though flashbacks show us it was a little more complicated than that, and uses the remaining eye to destroy Midas. As the clean-up begins, no one is entirely sure what happened, only knowing that Uatu and Fury seem to really be dead. However, unbeknownst to everyone, a new being named the Unseen has emerged, someone bound to witness all just as Uatu did. In finishing news, Thor still can't pick up his hammer, Oubliette has one of Midas' still working hands, and Winter Soldier has seemingly taken Nick's place on the world's front lines.

One of the things that ended up frustrating me about this series was that I don't think it was poorly written or that the characters weren't well-done or something. I do think there were parts that dragged a bit and I think that the story wasn't particularly strong, certainly not strong enough to overcome my cynicism about releasing all these secrets into the world (especially the secrets that didn't end up impressing me) and about events as a whole. Still, it's hard to complain too much as we walk away from ORIGINAL SIN with a couple of big, key changes (no more Watcher, no more Nick Fury, Thor can't lift his hammer, Bucky's in space, etc.) and as there were a couple of good character moments. I didn't think Nick Fury's plot was very strong; I'll always consider Fury the wheels-within-wheels guy as opposed to the front-lines-of-Earth guy. I think that there's certainly room for both definitions and that one doesn't necessarily preclude the other, but there's something much more clever and much more sly to the first than to the second and that's the Fury I like reading. Anyway, though I didn't like his story, I thought that Aaron wrote him well enough to generate real sympathy and real heart for him as the series ends. I think everyone else gets a fair shake too. Geez, what a conflicting event. I guess I'm still not totally impressed with it but I can't say I full-out didn't like it. Sounds like a certain score to me...

Total Score: 3/5

Original Sin 7

Original Sin 7
Aaron (w) and Deodato (a) and F. Martin (c) and Eliopoulos (l)

The Avengers have brought the fight to Nick Fury, who has just revealed to his pseudo-team that he had taken countless lives protecting Earth and gaining tech to protect Earth and hasn't exactly denied killing the Watcher. Fury, in his powerful suit, fights off the Avengers, using his knowledge and the secrets he learned from the Watcher to pick them apart, including overriding Iron Man's armor to send it back to Earth and telling Thor a secret that suddenly makes him unable to wield Mjolnir. Finally, he manages to extricate himself from the fight holding the two eyeballs and returns to the moon to bear witness to Watcher's last secret while a slew of other Watchers arrive.

As readers of this blog have probably realized, I tend to be wary of big events. I've certainly mentioned that fact enough, though I've also mentioned that I really liked CIVIL WAR and I think it still holds up pretty well. So while I'm wary, I do still root for the event to succeed because, in general, I like good stories and, in specifics, I run a blog wherein I review every major Marvel comic release and boy is it terrible when I have to review a book I don't like, particularly one that allegedly has major implications on the Universe and carries on for too many issues. Do you guys see where I'm going with this? It's not that this event has become unreadable or anything like that to me (sorry BATTLE OF THE ATOM and AGE OF ULTRON, you don't have company in that category), it's just...I don't know, kind of boring? It's also been, from the get-go, a sort of way to kickstart the universe. I very carefully am not saying "restart" or "reboot" or "reset" because it's very carefully not doing that. Instead, it's deus ex machinating (I had written machina-ing and autocorrect suggested machinating and I actually liked that better, thus providing me the one time autocorrect improved something) a way to drop a bunch of stories into a universe already overwrought with continuity. I'm not even REALLY begrudging it that because I can't imagine how hard it is to break through that continuity sometimes. I'm just begrudging that it's still kind of boring and it's carried on probably four issues too long.

Total Score: 2/5

Original Sin 6, Original Sin 3.2 - Hulk vs. Iron Man

Original Sin 6
Aaron (w) and Deodato (a) and F. Martin (c) and Eliopoulos (l)

Nick still won't confess or deny the murder of the Watcher but he admits that he called all of them there (aside from Rocket, who turned up on Moon Knight's and Gamora's behalf) in the hopes that at least one of them would want to take up his mantle, that these are the people most able to do his job. Fury Prime, who also reveals that the Infinity Formula keeping him young is now gone and he's aging rapidly as a result, returns to his work and begins interrogating the Orb on how to make the eyes talk. The team he left behind fight the other Furys in the hope that they'd get to the other Fury just as the Avengers also arrive only to find Nick waiting for them in a battle suit.

Look, who killed the Watcher? I don't want to say that there wasn't interesting stuff in here because I think there still was but I've often chided events for lasting too long and I think this event is suffering from that in this very issue. Aaron does a solid job keeping the pace of this issue moving but you're not in an event to see the rest issues or to reset for a minute. You're in an event because something huge is happening. Nothing huge happened in this issue. It felt like a recap of the last one and a prep for the next one, which will be the penultimate issue. Not a lot more I can say about it. AND YET, this review took SO LONG TO WRITE. I'm a little out of it, you guys. Long day. ANYWAY, don't let that cloud your judgment of my Total Score.

Total Score: 2/5


Original Sin 3.2 - Hulk vs. Iron Man
Gillen and Waid (s) and Gillen (w) and L. Ross (a) and Guru eFX (c) and Caramagna (l)

Tony buys an unsuccessful motel nearby to where the original gamma bomb went off, trying to remember what happened there back when he and Banner once yelled at one another there, as Banner goes to Arno to work on a tweak for Extremis. Tony remembers back to a time with Thunderbolt Ross wherein he was officially paid to help Banner, back to the fight the two geniuses had, and back to his decision to knowingly sabotage the bomb. Meanwhile, Banner's tweak worked and he's off and running.

I liked this issue a good deal more than the first for a couple reasons: first and foremost, it's an actual addition to the story as opposed to just kicking things off with information solicits and interviews told us (again, not Waid nor Gillen's fault there, but still made for a more boring read). Second, though, I really do appreciate that Tony very clearly is the villain here. We all know that Tony was a war profiteer and an arms dealer and, you know, still rather Tony but drunker and less ethical. To then have Gillen make Tony completely at fault for what's happening, a pretty major "completely at fault," is pretty gutsy, particularly where this is still a well-liked "hero" character. Strong move. Still some slowness to the plot as we build to the climax (there was some good new information and information that colored the story a bit more, but by and large, it didn't give much new).

Total Score: 4/5

Original Sin 5

Original Sin 5
Aaron (w) and Deodato (a) and F. Martin (c) and Eliopoulos (l)

On top of his usual roles as soldier, spy, and head of SHIELD, Nick Fury has also long been keeping an eye on the extraterrestrial plains insofar as they concern Earth. Since the days of Howard Stark and newcomer (though dead now, but newcomer to this universe in this flashback) Woodrow McCord, Fury's spent some time in a secret base monitoring alien life and intercepting any who strayed too close. How did he manage to be a one-man SWORD and head of SHIELD? Oh right, those LMDs he has in droves. Fury's secret war (well, at least this secret war) has been carrying on for some time and now his team is a little concerned that maybe it put him at odds with the Watcher, though Fury has no real comment on that. Instead, he believes maybe it's his turn to die as well as the Watcher's.

Tons of never-before-seen history for Nick Fury as the world's most secret secret agent reveals another facet of his life that might be more engaging if SWORD didn't currently exist. I think it's still somewhat engaging here because it's just another "well, Nick Fury does everything, I suppose" kind of story and a good Fury story tends to be a story worth reading but with SWORD in play (though often more than a little incompetent) it's hard to really get a scale for the invasions he's been holding off. Aaron also pulls the "for every one invasion we see, dozens more are stopped by this last line of defense" bit, which is essentially saying "look, we know there are a lot of invasions in Marvel but there would have been even MORE if not for this retcon." Deodato does some solid work and Frank Martin continues to deliver with all of his books (I'm particularly high on Martin right now because EAST OF WEST is one of the best books I think I've ever read). Real atmosphere book meant to give us a sense of the scale of this story if not to drive it along more.

Total Score: 4/5

Original Sin 2, Avengers World 6

Original Sin 2
Aaron (w) and Deodato (a) and F. Martin (c) and Eliopoulos (l)

The Avengers and other assorted New York heroes continue to come across Mindless Ones terrified by what they've seen. They capture one to try to trace their unique energy signatures to find if there are more in the city, eventually leading them to one building. Meanwhile, the shadowy B-team has split up and started to find other corpses, still hoping to trail the murderer through various dimensions. Back in New York, the heroes have surrounded the building housing a dozen more Mindless Ones and find that they're being run by Exterminatrix and the Orb, just about the weirdest villain pairing Aaron could have come up with. The Avengers and company quickly take down Exterminatrix and the Mindless Ones but the Orb finally manages to get the eye of the Watcher that he's been so closely monitoring to open, hoping to reveal the world's secrets.

Story
The murder investigation is open on two different fronts, with the Avengers tracking down the Mindless Ones because they had the Ultimate Nullifier, recently in the Watcher's possession, and the shadowy B-team searching a little more broadly for cosmic-scale murderers on another level. Jason Aaron promised that this series would be more a murder mystery book than anything else and that certainly seems to be the case here. It does feel as if the Orb and Exterminatrix are simply benefitting from the death of Watcher but didn't have anything to do with it (seems particularly true since, you know, it's the Orb) so the Avengers have to deal with that now as well as the explosion of the eyeball truth-bomb. Certainly on the right track here. 5/5

Character
Events are tricky because characters don't tend to get much of a spotlight. You'll see a handful of them playing a big role and then most character defining comes out of their dialogue or out of the tie-in books. There's a big cast of characters in this one so far and Aaron is doing some good work to keep everyone's voice relatively intact. Sometimes it's a little more of a generalized view on a voice, intent on keeping someone's voice separate from someone else's on the same page, but it gets the point across. There are particularly nice moments with the shadowy B-team as very random pairings (Emma Frost and Black Panther, Dr. Strange and Punisher) work together and their dialogue sort of clashes intentionally. 4/5

Writing
The tone is pretty good for a murder mystery sort of story though there's a little too much exposition necessary for the pacing to be what you'd like it to be. There's a lot of jumping back and forth as various crime scenes are checked which I think works really well for a mystery, the sort of chaotic bouncing that doesn't let anyone get particularly comfortable, but big blocks of expository text sort of slow things down. Not sure if the book would be helped by trimming that down or if it would just make things confusing, but it's worth mentioning here. 4/5

Art
Deodato was chosen for this book because he's very talented, can draw just about anyone in the Marvel Universe (and he's asked to here), and he works quickly. In that respect, it's very much a standard Deodato book. 5/5

Miscellaneous
It's hard sometimes to get a lot of personality into an event series because there's just too much happening. In that regard, there are a lot of sort-of action movie-esque jokes threaded through here, very simple one-liners or asides or what-have-you. I'd be fine if we didn't have those. Have to imagine that this is the only occasion I'll have to tag "the Orb" in one of my blog post labels.

Total score: 4/5


Avengers World 6
Spencer (w) and Checchetto (a) and Mossa (c) and Caramagna (l)

Captain Marvel, Thor, and Hyperion have been teleported into Barbuda by Manifold in the hopes of finding and rescuing Sunspot, Cannonball, and Smasher (now, unbeknownst to the team, Messenger for AIM). While Thor and Captain Marvel fight outside, Hyperion finds his way into the city and into one of Forson's main science buildings, the one that houses the Auger, the gateway between dimensions and the door from which Hyperion entered this universe after seeing his own destroyed. Forson does the typical sort of evil villain monologue, telling Hyperion that he realizes that he doesn't belong here, that he's fitting in for now but he knows how different he is and how he'll stand against them at some point, hoping that he'll join AIM's cause willingly. Hyperion, reflecting back to the time he's spent watching the children he's sworn to protect in the Savage Land and the time hanging out with Thor, refuses, destroying the Auger and preparing to attack Forson when Smasher appears and hurls him incredibly far out before grabbing both Captain Marvel and Thor and doing the same with them.

Story
The heavies of the Avengers all seem to be involved in this fight and it's pretty stunning to watch as Smasher handily defeats them all. It's tricky to gauge since her fellow Avengers clearly don't want to harm her but still, she really does a number on them. ANYWAY, it's your standard invade-AIM-Island story but, unlike most AIM invasions, the Avengers don't win this one. Moreover, it's a story of Hyperion, which will be detailed more in "character." 4/5

Character
It's a nice look at Hyperion, one of the newer members of the Avengers that we don't know so much about. It echoes a lot of what we've seen already from him, the strong warrior who lost his entire universe and who is doing what he can, fighting against time, to stop this universe from dying too. I don't know how much new information is in here for Hyperion that we haven't already seen glimpses of but it's useful to get another look on it and a bit of a refined angle on it (the last time we really checked in on Hyperion was just after taking the little children under his protection, now he's had a little more time to think on them). There's a real and palpable sadness to him that comes out pretty nicely in the narration and the art. 5/5

Writing
As I mentioned above, the narration comes from Hyperion and it does its work to characterize him, taking care to show his strength but also to show his sadness. The relationship between Thor and Hyperion continues to quietly be one of the best relationships the Avengers books have shown in some time and one of the most intricate looks at Thor I think we've seen in a while, maybe since his relationship with Loki in Gillen's JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY. You're in pretty good shape with me if I'm comparing any aspect of your book to that series. 5/5

Art
I really like Marco Checchetto's art and it holds up its high standard here. The key here is, even with all the fighting, showing Hyperion and his emotion, even as he tries to remain a little distant with this world that he fears will fall just like his did. It's strong work and it conveys everything it needs to and more. 5/5

Miscellaneous
This book is doing exactly what it promised, giving us a nice window into the personality and the character of some of our lesser-known Avengers. I'm not sure we should be excusing AVENGERS for needing that sort of window, but that's not really this book's fault.

Total score: 5/5

2014's event "Original Sin" revealed

Quick note to say that CBR has confirmed this year's big event at Marvel (or, the way things have been going lately, presumably one of its big events) will be ORIGINAL SIN, by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato. ORIGINAL SIN will center around the murder of the Watcher and the villain who stole his secrets, harkening back a bit to Ed Brubaker and Javier Pulido's 2011 POINT ONE one-shot, which saw a couple of spies trying to steal secrets from the Watcher. The series will be eight issues itself and will have its share of tie-ins (those tie-ins haven't been revealed yet but Aaron promises they'll be a bit different than other tie-ins have worked in the past, swearing that these tie-ins wouldn't exist if they didn't have something important to say). ORIGINAL SIN will feature a big cast of both A-listers and people more out of the spotlight (Aaron says, for example, characters like Emma Frost, Black Panther, Punisher, and Ant-Man will all play big roles) and will focus on solving the murder of the Watcher by "head detective" Nick Fury, as in original Nick Fury (excited about that, anyway). I'm fairly on the fence about this one and will just have to wait until May to start forming an opinion.

Daredevil 32, FF 13

Daredevil 32
Waid (w) and Samnee (a) and Rodriguez (c)

Foggy's not dead and Matt isn't fooled by the dummy hanging in front of him, nor is he fooled by the cyanide-laced "suicide note" that "Foggy left." He picks up the trail again after taking down a couple of dirty cops and enlisting Foggy's help in research on the Serpent Society. The research leads him down a more mystical path and so Daredevil pays a visit to his personal mystical consultant, Dr. Strange. Strange, in turn, points him to known-werewolf Jack Russell down in Kentucky. Matt arrives in Kentucky to find Russell and finish his research. It doesn't go as planned, though, when he ends up unwittingly defending a posse of monsters led by Satana, daughter of the devil. He escapes into the trees to figure out his next move where he is shot by a member of the angry crowd chasing the monsters.

Geez, now we're going to be maybe-killing a character at the end of every issue apparently. It's a good issue though with Daredevil immediately outwitting Jester and a nice little look from Jester at how some of the villains in the world view him. Even when supervillains know that Matt is Daredevil, they don't necessarily know the truth about Matt. Jester's Foggy prank relies entirely on Matt seeing the body, not smelling it, as well as seeing the suicide note instead of smelling the cyanide inside. Some nice character work between the Matt and Foggy as they get a nice moment of tough love from Matt, slapping some junk food out of Foggy's hand. More good Matt character stuff as he pays a visit to Doc Strange (wouldn't be upset if Strange started getting a bigger role in this book) and Strange doesn't reveal Russell's...condition to Matt, leaving him a little in the dark when he arrives and thinks that the townspeople are simply crazy racists, not monster-haters (unless "monster" is a race, in which case they're still totally racist). There's a lot happening here and most of it, despite the interesting and kind of abrupt plot-change, is character-based. More great Samnee art, of course, as Daredevil continues to be one of the most complete solo books out there, maybe second only to Hawkeye (if it's second to Hawkeye). I think Captain Marvel would be up there but the art team has changed so much it's hard to call it continuously the most complete solo book. It's still certainly up there. Okay, I'll stop ranking now.

FF 13
Fraction and Lee Allred (s) and Lee Allred (w) and M. Allred (a) and L. Allred (c)

The FF has been transported somewhere after Alex's tampering with the portal intended to bring the F4 back. They've been transported somewhere...impossible. That's right, obviously they're in the fabrics of the pants of the Impossible Man. Scott instantly realizes that this is Alex and Ahura's doing and puts them aside for now. The Impossible Man drops them off on the moon alongside the Watcher (and, inexplicably, a lady Watcher), who Scott instantly threatens with a fake Ultimate Nullifier so that his motley crew can stay there and plan their next move. After a weird and useless subplot with the Red Ghost trying to steal secrets from the Watcher and freaking out about everyone he sees, Scott starts planning their return and their next move against Doom, one that he'll have to come at with less emotion than he's been reserving for Doom of late.

The FF has had a fairly quirky bent throughout its recent run but, over the last couple issues, it's gotten openly more goofy. There is a difference, in case you haven't thought about it before. Quirky still leaves room for solid emotion and solid growth, things like Tong deciding she's female and the clone of a supervillain marring attempts to foil a date and only making it more wonderful. Goofy's a little different and allows for less character while we get a little more comic relief. The problem with comic relief is that it needs to relieve something. If there's not enough going on in the story or if that story doesn't have much by way of stakes or drama, it means that comic relief doesn't quite work. Of course, there is still a plot going on that has drama inherent to it (the F4 are in space and their replacements aren't feeling particularly confident with how things have gone, no one knows what to make of old John Storm, two kids just tried to commit murder, Scott is going to be pitted against the man who was responsible for his daughter's death, etc.) but it feels like the excess of comic relief has taken away from that. There aren't many issues of FF left and they'll need to turn that tone around pretty quickly if they want to make a meaningful exit.