Monsters are showing up all over the world with a mysterious origin. Heroes aren’t fighting heroes! Meh.
Creative Staff:
Writer: Cullen Bunn
Art: Steve McNiven
VC’s Travis Lanham
Creative Staff:
THE EPIC BATTLE MARVEL FANS HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR, DRAWN BY TODAY’S GREATEST ARTISTS!!! It’s all hands on deck with the AVENGERS, CHAMPIONS, GUARDIANS, X-MEN, and the INHUMANS as they clash with monstrous threats that threaten to destroy every corner of the Marvel Universe. Who are the LEVIATHONS? Who controls them? How can they be stopped before Earth becomes another tragic, barren world in their wake? Written by powerhouse writer CULLEN BUNN and drawn by Marvel legend STEVE mcNIVEN, this issue is the beginning of something big that you just can’t miss!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Marvel has had no shortage of event comics come around in recent times. Amid all the X-Men fighting Inhumans and secret happenings, here’s a comic that does something strange…Heroes aren’t fighting heroes! What we have here is that through means unknown to he world’s heroes, giant monsters are falling out of the sky and attacking. We get some intermittent shots going between various hero teams trying to contain the monsters, a young boy drawing, and Elsa Bloodstone talking about how this whole thing was apparently prophesied. The young boy is the one summoning the monsters, and our first issue ends with the boy being confronted by Fin Fang Foom and two other monsters, who warn him that summoning the monsters is a bad idea.
This could go either pretty well or badly. The premise, having the young boy summon all these monsters by drawing them is shaky at best, though I will give credit and say that for once it has superheroes fighting evil instead of each other for once. While it’s nice to see Fin Fang Foom again, I worry that this event, like so many of Marvel’s big events lately, will not live up to the potential it has and will yet again be an event that comes and goes. The art is standard Marvel fare, McNiven’s art neither really impresses or repulses. It stays in a neutral grey area of “meh” and is quite normal for Marvel’s recent fare. The writing is ok. The team has done bounds above Civil War II, but that’s not exactly hard. What we get here is a standard set up issue that shows us the premise and sets up the problems ahead. It does little more than that and honestly, after the visions of it and all the ads, I expected a bit more from it. It isn’t a bad book by any stretch, it just sorta is there.
In Summary:
The monster designs are cool and some of the characters are written well, but maybe the problem lies in the fact that this legitimately is just a set up issue AND is yet another event in what has been an unending slew of them. The book isn’t terrible if one has a mind to pick it up, but it isn’t great and doesn’t wow you either. It’s a book that feels like a middle of the road book when what Marvel needs now is a big “WOW” book. The pacing in this issue is sorta off in places, but overall it is cohesive and readers will understand it. If you’re interested, maybe look for it, but otherwise, this book is safe to ignore really.
Grade: C-
Released By: Marvel Comics
Release Date: January 18, 2017
MSRP: $4.99
