In the mid 90s, Marvel was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, probably from producing too many foil cover variants that nobody ever bought. In order to try to boost sales, they created the company wide crossover of the Onslaught Saga, which ended with everybody except the X-Men and Spider-man dying. Then, they rebooted these characters in what was known as the "Heroes Reborn" storyline, which was supposed to solve thirty years of continuity gaffes, but instead was just boring and lame. This trade collects the first six issues of the Fantastic Four's Heroes Reborn story, which basically compresses the first 52 issues of old Fantastic Four continuity down. It's rushed and really boring, but Jim Lee drew it so that was a plus for anybody who likes Jim Lee's art, which in the 90s was everybody, and today is almost everybody I guess.RATING: 38%
Posts
3 comments:
As much love as I have for Jim Lee, this was kind of a trainwreck. I did like the first issue, however. I like how we consistently try to find ways to express how four people (or five, as the case may be) can steal an experimental space shuttle. It makes gamma rays turning a person into a giant green/gray/red person some of the time but not all the time seem positively possible.
Digression aside, unfortunately, Jim Lee has the problem of working with some really lackluster writers (Brandon Choi, Jeph Loeb, Frank Miller, etc.) and this was not good. Unbelievably, this was one series that got progressively worse every issue, something I can hardly ever say about a series, or for that matter, any run on a series.
PS - Sort of kidding about the Frank Miller thing. But seriously, wtf?
I guess that is true about Jim Lee. When has he ever been with a really great writer? To be fair, I liked Hush for like 7 of the 12 issues, and the Azzarallo Superman stuff was sort of good when I could understand it. Maybe his X-Men run in the early 90s was good? Chris Claremont was still not quite crazy?
I used to love Jim Lee back in the day. Now I find his stuff a little too slick and pinup-ish, and his facial expressions limited. Of course, I haven't looked at much of his new stuff, although he did a cool drawing of Lono in 100 Bullets, which you have to read if you haven't yet.
Post a Comment