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Thursday, June 22, 2006
Quick Hits
X-Isle by Andrew Cosby, Michael A. Nelson and Greg Scott
This latest Boom! Studios release makes a good stab at transplanting the feel of popular semi-sci-fi ensemble television dramas, which is its strength and also its weakness. Much of this first issue is focused on set-up. A mysterious creature washes on shore, and another mysterious creature, along with some mysterious plants, are found in its stomach. A crew of scientists go out to sea to investigate it, and end up ship-wrecked, by total coincidence, on the very island that the strange plants and creatures come from. It's not a bad premise, but the chain of events is so poorly defined and randomly executed that it comes off as contrived. Why, exactly, are they studying cryptids in the middle of the ocean, and not in a lab on land? Was there some sort of map on the creature indicating where it came from that we weren't told about? Additionally the cast is very large and most of them spend this first issue in a determined race to prove which of them is the most unpleasant to be around. And to be honest, I would probably be more charitably inclined toward this comic if it wasn't for the fact that we've seen so many of these plot-heavy, coincidence driven sci-fi plots in the last few years that it's really a necessity to make a new entry in the field stand out more than The Lost World via Lost. Gregg Scott's art is nice though.
One of the thoughts I keep coming back to with "superstar" writers and artists, especially the ones that seem to be driving the plot-bus at Marvel these days, is this: today's John Byrne circa 1980 is tomorrow's John Byrne circa 2006.
Definitive proof Jimmy Olsen is heterosexual: Oh, like any self-respecting gay man would be caught dead in one of those outfits!
