Meaningless Awards of the Week- 8/8/07

Confirmation of the Week- Black Adam’s still a badass, Black Adam #1

Writer Peter Tomasi showed us this week that despite getting his powers taken away by Captain Marvel (and despite his lackluster appearance in Countdown), Teth-Adam is still a frickin’ badass. First, we see Adam ordering his loyal followers to pummel him for two days straight so that he would be completely unrecognizable. Then he and his crew sneaks back into Kahndaq, and take out a heavily armed UN force with knives and a crowbar in order to retrieve the remains of the extremely decomposed Isis, which he straps to his back for a trek into the Himalayas. While on said trek Adam kills his last remaining follower and feasts on his uncooked lower half, before reaching his destination, a Lazarus Pit, which he uses to bring Isis back from the dead. Even without the powers of six Egyptian gods, Teth Adam is not someone you want to be messing with.

Line of the Week- from X-Factor #22 by Peter David

M, to Siryn: “You have a deep streak of cruelty, Theresa. I’m starting to think we could be friends after all.”

Worst Book of the Week- New Excalibur #22

New Excalibur has never been a great book, but it’s always been pretty enjoyable. Chris Claremont’s comic about this England-based superteam has never made headlines at the House of Ideas, but I’ve never once read an issue that made me question whether I should continue to buy the series. Until now.

I’m not sure what happened this issue, but it was just all kinds of bad. Several times characters repeated exactly what they had said in a previous panel almost word for word, once even in the very next panel. After an extremely lackluster fight scene between Excalibur and a bunch of Captain Britain clones, the absolute worst part of the book occurred over the last three pages: there are 17 panels of just Shadow Beast’s face as he’s trying to not die from a clearly fatal sword-through-the-chest wound. There are three reasons this didn’t work:

1) Readers were given no reason to care about the character, or any of the Shadow X-Men for that matter. They’ve been portrayed as heartless villains for the previous 21 issues, and really have no reason to fight for the cause of good.

2) The artist on this book is not of the caliber necessary to depict seventeen unique facial expressions one might go through while dying. Especially considering half the characters face is concealed by a mask. Pat Oliffe is by no means a bad artist, but John Cassaday he ain’t.

3) Chris Claremont’s dialogue, as mentioned before, is just not very good. He can still write a plot with the best of them, but this guy needs someone else to write his dialogue almost as much as George Lucas does.

Surprise of the Week- Exiles didn’t completely suck

I guess it’s pretty bad when every couple of weeks I’m surprised that a comic I bought didn’t suck. Don’t get me wrong though; there was still plenty of suck in Exiles #97. The art was not very good, which is especially noteworthy because Exiles has had a history of what I consider to be really great artists (Mike McKone, Jim Calafiore, Clayton Henry, Mizuki Sakakibara, and Paul Pelletier). And Chris Claremont wrote it, so once again it had the aforementioned problem of characters repeating exactly what they already said. And Blink, Morph and Longshot were able to beat Hulk, She-Hulk and the Human Torch in a fight, which should never really happen under any circumstances. But at least it turned out that the Ultimate-looking character that showed up at the end of last issue wasn’t from the Ultimate Universe. It was the last page that really saved this one for me: the return of Thunderbird, who’s been in a near-death comatose state in a previously visited world for 80+ issues, wondering where he is (since the Exiles hadn’t reached the Crystal Palace before he left the team) and where his pregnant girlfriend Nocturne is (who has since miscarried and left the team). Maybe Claremont knows more about the Exiles then I previously gave him credit for.