oh wow fear itself sounds like it's horrible underwhelming/ehhhhhhhhhhh
spoilers stolen from the cbr forums
Stark presents the Avengers with their weapons; there is no transformation scene, Wolvie is already transformed in the next page.
The Serpent shouts a final challenge to Odin as the Mighty arrive to help Cap.
Cut to a scene from Home Front #7, then Thor (already in his new armor) confronting the Serpent. After Mjolnir's fall stuns Cap, he raises it (he's worthy!) and shouts the classic call "AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!"
And here is where the depiction of the Mighty falls short. If you are expecting a full one-on-one (or several-on-one) between the Mighty and the Worthy, you'll be disappointed, because Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel are not pictured actually using their weapons, they're just holding/wearing them. No, Natasha doesn't go after Sin in revenge (Cap does), she goes after Sin's militia; Clint takes down some mechas; Strange and Danny confront Titania; Red She-Hulk faces Attuma; and Wolvie battles Juggernaut.
Odin leads Asgard to march on Midgard, before Thor lands the death blow on the Serpent who plummets back to Earth with Thor in his wake as Sif cries our that they're too late. All the hammers fly out of Worthys' grasps as Odin summons them (Spidey already colored in his red-and-blue costume), before Thor walks the (nine?) steps to his father, and apparently dies.
Saturday: Thor lies atop an unlit pyre on Asgard's former site in Broxton as Odin whisks himself and his brother's body (whom he names as "Cul") to Asgard as all the other Asgardians are sent to their surprise to Broxton, apparently for good.
Cap and Natasha attend Bucky's military funeral at Arlington; all the Mighty weapons are sent back to Svartalfheim for melting (so they don't get to keep their new toys), and Cap's shield is remade with Uru added (though with a visible scar). Caps declares the recovery and rebuilding to start.
Four epilogues. Sin is busted out by loyal followers and plots about the hammers; the Hulk and Banner personae meet in Banner's mind before Banner wakes up, in the desert dressed in a hospital gown with an IV drip, physically separated from the Hulk who leaves; A Sergeant Marcus Johnson is mentioned in a conspiracy-type conversation as becoming a wanted man; and Hulk calls on Strange for help on the Nul entity now loose in the world. These lead to up to the Fearless, Hulk, Battle Scars, and Defenders, respectively.
One big omission for me is the Thing's total disappearance (or even mention) after he is healed by Franklin. I'm guessing we might see flashback scenes in the Fearless issue where Valkyrie will go after his hammer in the Baxter Building, of him furtively retreating to the safety of FF HQ with the kids, but his departure really should have been addresses here.
Having a giant sized finale with 3 trailer episodes really seems to be pushing the "Big events should be limited to 7 issues" thing. I really liked Fear Itself, but the main book felt too abbreviated as the review implies.
I suppose it all evens out with the big events that I have no interest in.
To be honest I'd be happy if no event was ever longer than half a half dozen issues. More than that and tie-ins just become a pain in the arse.
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
edited October 2011
Picked up the issue, and for 5 bucks you do get a lot of pages. Real pages too, not sketches and half-assed commentary or scripts.
But the story was bad, and Immonen's art can't save it. In fact, there's a few pages that are nothing more than pitches in a meeting of "oh my God wouldn't this be cool?" and it just feels generic rather than cool. In one page, for instance,
Cap lifts Thor's hammer and says Avengers Assemble, with the implication being that everyone is an Avenger today, koombiyah and all that jazz. A splash page worm's eye view, but the way it was drawn it looks like Sin's Nazi robots are also rallying on Cap's side, so the page doesn't really work. It just doesn't convey an awe inspiring page.
Most importantly, this is nothing but a reset, to the point where all the epilogue stuff doesn't matter, and the issue really makes the Worthy seem....worthless. The Mighty too, for that matter. The ending relies on a belief that everything that wasn't reset with this issue won't be fixed by April of next year, because the Avengers movie takes precedent. You also have Fraction trying to pull some happy vibes news flash stuff like he did with the first issue that doesn't really work, because much like Secret Invasion this series has never made it feel like the entire world was in trouble. Oh sure, there's talk that it's that bad but it never comes across that way. The way everything is glossed over at the end it reminds me of the end of Kang War with how everyone, even Marvel, forget DC was blowed up. On top of that you don't really get to see Cap be USAgent, it's almost two panels. Some more plot spoilers below:
Only a few Worthy get actual panel time, but nothing major. And then Odin takes all the weapons back for some reason after Thor kills the Serpent (who didn't see it being Odin's brother? It was obviously a family member from issue #1).
The Asgardians are back on Earth, where they were 6 months prior. Odin closed the door to Asgard behind them, and is sitting there with his dead brother.
Thor is "dead" but he'll be back in time for the movie no doubt, so a hollow death. And we went five years without him before recently, so him being gone for 6 months isn't a sad thing.
Bucky's funeral is half a page, that's it.
Sin breaks out of captivity immediately to set up the Fearless story, and this is where it makes the whole event feel weak, because she has no real consequences for a worldwide attack.
The Battle Scars stuff doesn't seem interesting, just another shadowy organization in the Marvel Universe whoopdee doo.
The stuff with Hulk being just disappears, so I guess Dracula beat him or something? Basically everything seems to stop when the Serpent dies but that doesn't make sense because the Defender lead-in shows the things still exist after he dies. And the Thing doesn't show up either.
The only thing that seemed interesting in the issue was the lead-in to Defenders, it clicked with me, like there is an actual story there to tell compared to the other three lead-in stories.
tl;dr It's a scatterd, unsatisfying conclusion to an event that is basically leading into another event and brushes over the "big" parts of the story like even Marvel concedes it doesn't really matter, screw you we took your five bucks. It basically turned into Secret Invasion 2.0. Good art and lots of pages but nothing worthwhile because everything is now all about Point One or this Phoenix story.
That was pretty bad, and the epilogue convinced me to skip Defenders now that I know the "problem" they're teaming up to stop, and how closely related it is to this awful event.
Yeah, I flipped through it when I got JIM and Hulk and then saw Sin strapped to a table yelling something and that splash page from above and said, "Fuck it. I don't care."
It's a shame because JIM was amazing, and I can re-read the whole series at least three times.
I'll grant people the idea that things change. They do. Comics do change, even for a while. The problem is that the world never changes except as it changes IRL. There are consequences to heroes and gods, but they have no resonance outside of their own little world (except for cosmic stories, which leads to some rather excessive devastation to make it fit with the scope). That's why I hated SA #15 so much. Black Widow was justifying that they live in a whole other world where this stuff matters but meanwhile civilians and readers can expect that there is a caveat of not that much and rarely if ever for a chosen few.
Or as Gillen wrote in JIM, my MotW:
But gods do not have history. They have story. And that is something a writer always has the prerogative to twist.
I kinda liked it, although I wish the epilogues were used for more in-depth action pages.
Say what you will about manga/anime, but you just know the Japanese would have had the Worthy and Mighty pair up for fights. And even though each fight would be a long fucking story arc, it at least would have felt better than the few spreads we got.
I kinda liked it, although I wish the epilogues were used for more in-depth action pages.
Say what you will about manga/anime, but you just know the Japanese would have had the Worthy and Mighty pair up for fights. And even though each fight would be a long fucking story arc, it at least would have felt better than the few spreads we got.
It was a matter of pacing essentially, which was a huge problem with the entire book, and the end result of it was, as Texiken said, the stakes never felt high at all. Even the mighty just felt pointless in the end, because they were never really built up or even shown to be all that powerful; there were just massive gaps in the storytelling, and the rest of the event was too weak to get me interested enough to fill those gaps with my mind.
I kinda liked it, although I wish the epilogues were used for more in-depth action pages.
Say what you will about manga/anime, but you just know the Japanese would have had the Worthy and Mighty pair up for fights. And even though each fight would be a long fucking story arc, it at least would have felt better than the few spreads we got.
Yeah but the average weekly manga chapter is 18-19 pages... almost as much as those monthly books. So in the 7 months this ran, you would have had around 30 issues to devote to it. It actually never ceases to amaze me how much output the weekly authors do, as writers AND artists combined.
On a more related note though... This event overall has been a disappointment to me. I do find it amusing though that all of the BIG events seem to pale in comparison to the smaller events that run around the same time. Annihilation and the cosmic events... Spider-Island... Those have been so much better overall.
You can't really compare the weekly output in manga to a book like FI.
18-19 pages of un-colored work, most of the time of a lower quality than what the penciler on FI does, assistants to draw shit, and not as much dialogue as one would think and of questionable quality.
That's not all japanese comics, but it's a lot of them. Especially the ones that are popular.
The problem with Fear Itself is that from what I understand the Serpent accumulated power through fear, and the Worthy were not only weapons of war but weapons designed to instill fear in the world's populace.
Was there any indication of the world having cowed in fear before the requisite heroes kicking ass because all the goddamn villains all congregated to one spot where they could have a melee they never win.
Aside from the crazy amount of output and difference between colored and black and white works, I'm just saying it is something I wish we had the opportunity to see more of in American comics.
So I get it, I just wish these writers and artists were robots that never slept and existed purely for my entertainment purposes.
I was at an art museum this weekend (well, many, but this was while I was at one in particular) and the idea crossed my mind (right or wrong, I had the thought) as I stared at a painting with dozens of finely-detailed figures from like the 16th or 17th century that there are these amazing centuries-old paintings we revere for being exquisitely detailed, especially when looking at the ones with dozens or hundreds of people, and yet we expect the same general level of detail from comics artists on a monthly basis and then bitch when an issue cost exceeds three dollars.
Which is also a way of saying I think manga art quality is not up to my standards and I'll take the current output. People are already griping about Rags Morales' work on Action #2 seeming rushed. Within reason, I'll take quality over timeliness.
I like big, cosmic storylines and Asgard and all that kind of stuff. So on the one hand, I appreciated how FI gave me a chance to see Thor with the unsheathed Odinsword fighting a giant dragon snake monster, though I think it could have done with a bit more kirby crackle and energy blasts and so on. Nevertheless, it looked fun. But the rest of the combat was disappointing. We got to see Iron Fist hit Titania, ok, but the fight scenes were simply not that impressive. They didn't have the power that, say, Mighty Thor has had recently. We know that Fraction can deliver great fight scenes and that Immonen can structure and draw them wonderfully, but they weren't here. Which is a real shame.
And I think that leads me into my main complaint with this, in that it is disappointing. There's not really a big finish, a climatic final challenge and unforeseen twist. We knew at the beginning that Thor was doomed to strike down the Serpent and then die. And he does just that. There's no defiance of fate. Nothing that grabs you from page to page in order to find out exactly what happens next. Just Captain America delivering a big speech again, and then it's all over. Things will be rebuilt.
This can't hold a candle to any of the cosmic events. Even Chaos War, which was also a bit disappointing, managed to hold my interest more effectively. The colour and flash is there, but there's no substance, no impact, not even in the way that the fight scenes are constructed (and of all the things that should have been good, the fights were the big one).
To be honest, this event just left my thinking "why?" It wasn't needed (no story is really needed but apart from that many feel powerful and interesting and so on). It just seemed like an event for the point of it, an exercise in self indulgence. It should have been a stripped down Thor story, not an event. Fear Itself will likely be forgotten and it's content quickly passed, and even if it isn't it feels like it will.
I like Fraction as a writer but to be honest I feel that his recent work has had some flaws in it. I think that working on the Defenders will be good for him, a chance to return to superheroics without the Asgardians (which I think he writers poorly). Fear Itself took up half a year of storytelling, it's tie-ins dominated the Avengers books and with a few exceptions weren't actually very good. I'm glad it's over and I hope that we can have at least six months of regular stories before we move onto the next event, please.
18-19 pages of un-colored work, most of the time of a lower quality than what the penciler on FI does, assistants to draw shit, and not as much dialogue as one would think and of questionable quality.
That's not all japanese comics, but it's a lot of them. Especially the ones that are popular.
I was at an art museum this weekend (well, many, but this was while I was at one in particular) and the idea crossed my mind (right or wrong, I had the thought) as I stared at a painting with dozens of finely-detailed figures from like the 16th or 17th century that there are these amazing centuries-old paintings we revere for being exquisitely detailed, especially when looking at the ones with dozens or hundreds of people, and yet we expect the same general level of detail from comics artists on a monthly basis and then bitch when an issue cost exceeds three dollars.
Which is also a way of saying I think manga art quality is not up to my standards and I'll take the current output. People are already griping about Rags Morales' work on Action #2 seeming rushed. Within reason, I'll take quality over timeliness.
Are we comparing the worst of manga to the best of American comics now?
Something like Air Gear is absolutely equal art-wise to the best American comics.
And sometimes, dear god, I would take straight uncolored pages over what we're given. Some artists are improved by color, but not all.
I agree with pretty much everything that's been said about Fear Itself. I think it had a ton of potential, but ultimately the delivery stumbled. I feel like the story was kind of moving at a languid, unhurried pace, and then it was "oh shit, there's only one issue left! Better cram some shit in". I feel like there was maybe two issues' worth of useless crap between the first six issues, and then all of these important action or emotional scenes in the last issue get half a page or something, just to acknowledge that they happened, and no more. Thor fighting the Serpent felt very flat to me, for example; I would have liked to have seen a more elaborate fight.
Also,
Cap picking up Mjolnir
ended up being a bit of a non-event, didn't it?
On epilogues:
Have we not seen Hulk separated from Banner about a thousand times before? I'll admit that I've never really cared much about Hulk (even Planet Hulk), but this seems like a tremendous retread.
I am going to buy all the point issues and the special tie-in Thor issue.
And then I will not be reading anything by Fraction for a long while. Dude has slowly and methodically burnt away every ounce of goodwill I have ever had toward him.
That is just an unfortunate state resulting in death
Again, precedent; Colossus was turned to stone once by Pyro and Avalanche, Rogue touched him and turned to stone herself (which went away after a while), and Colossus was saved.
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WeaverWho are you?What do you want?Registered Userregular
That is just an unfortunate state resulting in death
Again, precedent; Colossus was turned to stone once by Pyro and Avalanche, Rogue touched him and turned to stone herself (which went away after a while), and Colossus was saved.
Yadda Yadda Colossus already has matter alteration powers so that was a subset of them yadda yadda
Solar on
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
Posts
yes thank you
Like, I'm talking Wonder Woman #1/Batman #1 good.
spoilers stolen from the cbr forums
The Serpent shouts a final challenge to Odin as the Mighty arrive to help Cap.
Cut to a scene from Home Front #7, then Thor (already in his new armor) confronting the Serpent. After Mjolnir's fall stuns Cap, he raises it (he's worthy!) and shouts the classic call "AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!"
And here is where the depiction of the Mighty falls short. If you are expecting a full one-on-one (or several-on-one) between the Mighty and the Worthy, you'll be disappointed, because Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel are not pictured actually using their weapons, they're just holding/wearing them. No, Natasha doesn't go after Sin in revenge (Cap does), she goes after Sin's militia; Clint takes down some mechas; Strange and Danny confront Titania; Red She-Hulk faces Attuma; and Wolvie battles Juggernaut.
Odin leads Asgard to march on Midgard, before Thor lands the death blow on the Serpent who plummets back to Earth with Thor in his wake as Sif cries our that they're too late. All the hammers fly out of Worthys' grasps as Odin summons them (Spidey already colored in his red-and-blue costume), before Thor walks the (nine?) steps to his father, and apparently dies.
Saturday: Thor lies atop an unlit pyre on Asgard's former site in Broxton as Odin whisks himself and his brother's body (whom he names as "Cul") to Asgard as all the other Asgardians are sent to their surprise to Broxton, apparently for good.
Cap and Natasha attend Bucky's military funeral at Arlington; all the Mighty weapons are sent back to Svartalfheim for melting (so they don't get to keep their new toys), and Cap's shield is remade with Uru added (though with a visible scar). Caps declares the recovery and rebuilding to start.
Four epilogues. Sin is busted out by loyal followers and plots about the hammers; the Hulk and Banner personae meet in Banner's mind before Banner wakes up, in the desert dressed in a hospital gown with an IV drip, physically separated from the Hulk who leaves; A Sergeant Marcus Johnson is mentioned in a conspiracy-type conversation as becoming a wanted man; and Hulk calls on Strange for help on the Nul entity now loose in the world. These lead to up to the Fearless, Hulk, Battle Scars, and Defenders, respectively.
One big omission for me is the Thing's total disappearance (or even mention) after he is healed by Franklin. I'm guessing we might see flashback scenes in the Fearless issue where Valkyrie will go after his hammer in the Baxter Building, of him furtively retreating to the safety of FF HQ with the kids, but his departure really should have been addresses here.
I suppose it all evens out with the big events that I have no interest in.
But the story was bad, and Immonen's art can't save it. In fact, there's a few pages that are nothing more than pitches in a meeting of "oh my God wouldn't this be cool?" and it just feels generic rather than cool. In one page, for instance,
Most importantly, this is nothing but a reset, to the point where all the epilogue stuff doesn't matter, and the issue really makes the Worthy seem....worthless. The Mighty too, for that matter. The ending relies on a belief that everything that wasn't reset with this issue won't be fixed by April of next year, because the Avengers movie takes precedent. You also have Fraction trying to pull some happy vibes news flash stuff like he did with the first issue that doesn't really work, because much like Secret Invasion this series has never made it feel like the entire world was in trouble. Oh sure, there's talk that it's that bad but it never comes across that way. The way everything is glossed over at the end it reminds me of the end of Kang War with how everyone, even Marvel, forget DC was blowed up. On top of that you don't really get to see Cap be USAgent, it's almost two panels. Some more plot spoilers below:
The Asgardians are back on Earth, where they were 6 months prior. Odin closed the door to Asgard behind them, and is sitting there with his dead brother.
Thor is "dead" but he'll be back in time for the movie no doubt, so a hollow death. And we went five years without him before recently, so him being gone for 6 months isn't a sad thing.
Bucky's funeral is half a page, that's it.
Sin breaks out of captivity immediately to set up the Fearless story, and this is where it makes the whole event feel weak, because she has no real consequences for a worldwide attack.
The Battle Scars stuff doesn't seem interesting, just another shadowy organization in the Marvel Universe whoopdee doo.
The stuff with Hulk being just disappears, so I guess Dracula beat him or something? Basically everything seems to stop when the Serpent dies but that doesn't make sense because the Defender lead-in shows the things still exist after he dies. And the Thing doesn't show up either.
The only thing that seemed interesting in the issue was the lead-in to Defenders, it clicked with me, like there is an actual story there to tell compared to the other three lead-in stories.
tl;dr It's a scatterd, unsatisfying conclusion to an event that is basically leading into another event and brushes over the "big" parts of the story like even Marvel concedes it doesn't really matter, screw you we took your five bucks. It basically turned into Secret Invasion 2.0. Good art and lots of pages but nothing worthwhile because everything is now all about Point One or this Phoenix story.
It's a shame because JIM was amazing, and I can re-read the whole series at least three times.
I'll grant people the idea that things change. They do. Comics do change, even for a while. The problem is that the world never changes except as it changes IRL. There are consequences to heroes and gods, but they have no resonance outside of their own little world (except for cosmic stories, which leads to some rather excessive devastation to make it fit with the scope). That's why I hated SA #15 so much. Black Widow was justifying that they live in a whole other world where this stuff matters but meanwhile civilians and readers can expect that there is a caveat of not that much and rarely if ever for a chosen few.
Or as Gillen wrote in JIM, my MotW:
Say what you will about manga/anime, but you just know the Japanese would have had the Worthy and Mighty pair up for fights. And even though each fight would be a long fucking story arc, it at least would have felt better than the few spreads we got.
It was a matter of pacing essentially, which was a huge problem with the entire book, and the end result of it was, as Texiken said, the stakes never felt high at all. Even the mighty just felt pointless in the end, because they were never really built up or even shown to be all that powerful; there were just massive gaps in the storytelling, and the rest of the event was too weak to get me interested enough to fill those gaps with my mind.
Yeah but the average weekly manga chapter is 18-19 pages... almost as much as those monthly books. So in the 7 months this ran, you would have had around 30 issues to devote to it. It actually never ceases to amaze me how much output the weekly authors do, as writers AND artists combined.
On a more related note though... This event overall has been a disappointment to me. I do find it amusing though that all of the BIG events seem to pale in comparison to the smaller events that run around the same time. Annihilation and the cosmic events... Spider-Island... Those have been so much better overall.
18-19 pages of un-colored work, most of the time of a lower quality than what the penciler on FI does, assistants to draw shit, and not as much dialogue as one would think and of questionable quality.
That's not all japanese comics, but it's a lot of them. Especially the ones that are popular.
Was there any indication of the world having cowed in fear before the requisite heroes kicking ass because all the goddamn villains all congregated to one spot where they could have a melee they never win.
So I get it, I just wish these writers and artists were robots that never slept and existed purely for my entertainment purposes.
Which is also a way of saying I think manga art quality is not up to my standards and I'll take the current output. People are already griping about Rags Morales' work on Action #2 seeming rushed. Within reason, I'll take quality over timeliness.
And I think that leads me into my main complaint with this, in that it is disappointing. There's not really a big finish, a climatic final challenge and unforeseen twist. We knew at the beginning that Thor was doomed to strike down the Serpent and then die. And he does just that. There's no defiance of fate. Nothing that grabs you from page to page in order to find out exactly what happens next. Just Captain America delivering a big speech again, and then it's all over. Things will be rebuilt.
This can't hold a candle to any of the cosmic events. Even Chaos War, which was also a bit disappointing, managed to hold my interest more effectively. The colour and flash is there, but there's no substance, no impact, not even in the way that the fight scenes are constructed (and of all the things that should have been good, the fights were the big one).
To be honest, this event just left my thinking "why?" It wasn't needed (no story is really needed but apart from that many feel powerful and interesting and so on). It just seemed like an event for the point of it, an exercise in self indulgence. It should have been a stripped down Thor story, not an event. Fear Itself will likely be forgotten and it's content quickly passed, and even if it isn't it feels like it will.
I like Fraction as a writer but to be honest I feel that his recent work has had some flaws in it. I think that working on the Defenders will be good for him, a chance to return to superheroics without the Asgardians (which I think he writers poorly). Fear Itself took up half a year of storytelling, it's tie-ins dominated the Avengers books and with a few exceptions weren't actually very good. I'm glad it's over and I hope that we can have at least six months of regular stories before we move onto the next event, please.
Which seems to have no reference in this book. Oh well.
And yet outside that book it's not even mentioned at all
Are we comparing the worst of manga to the best of American comics now?
Something like Air Gear is absolutely equal art-wise to the best American comics.
And sometimes, dear god, I would take straight uncolored pages over what we're given. Some artists are improved by color, but not all.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/
I write about video games and stuff. It is fun. Sometimes.
Also,
On epilogues:
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
and Fear Itself: More Fear
and Fear Itself Frontline Pulse
Surely it should all be wrapped in Fear Itself
Shame, really, it could have been a great event
like, do I need to read this or are you just trying to squeeze three or four more bucks off me
And then I will not be reading anything by Fraction for a long while. Dude has slowly and methodically burnt away every ounce of goodwill I have ever had toward him.
the Iron Man Point Issue has him dealing with the fallout of it
That is not a power
That is just an unfortunate state resulting in death
Again, precedent; Colossus was turned to stone once by Pyro and Avalanche, Rogue touched him and turned to stone herself (which went away after a while), and Colossus was saved.
but now I can't find it
Yadda Yadda Colossus already has matter alteration powers so that was a subset of them yadda yadda
always ruining everything
Why can't you just let the population of Paris be made of stone
What do you have against Parisians you Nazi