Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle Reviews
Secret Wars #4 of 8
Marvel Comics
Hickman, Ribic & Svorcina
"Secret Wars" rolls on with an issue that seems to boil this event down to Reed Richards versus Doom. While this probably doesn't come to anyone's surprise I found it to make the other characters in the comic book so secondary that they became background noise. I enjoyed the issue but found it to stop short of being anything memorable. With the coming delays about to hit (issue 5 is six week out while issue 6 is set for late September and issues 7 and 8 are TBD release dates at this point) it's going to be difficult to keep any momentum gained from this particular issue. This was an okay read.
The comic opens with Stephen Strange telling Reed and company how Doom is the God of everything. The narration helps to re-inform the reader of the landscape and how it came to be. This was more effective than simply sticking this in a recap because the characters he's speaking to have been locked in a ship for eight years. They may have questions. On the other hand the well versed reader could find this all repetitive.
Doom is alerted to some problems that the Thors are having with some outsiders. He decides to get involved. This part of the comic is where the cast of characters is simply washed away. Some of them, like Spider-Man, have a throwaway line, but for the most part all but four of the characters listed in the character rundown at the front of the comic serve no purpose. This was disappointing but not nearly as much as how Cyclops is handled.
I'm not sure the point of the Cyclops sequence. He decides to take on Doom and he gives a decent speech about power but is cast aside too easily I can't reconcile what his purpose in the book is. Is this another piece to theme about power and corruption? Couldn't this apply more so to Thanos? Why are the other characters standing around watching? The sequence just didn't seem to fit with the book.
Strange plays the middleman. Some kind of judge in the theme of who has too much power. He props up Doom but takes him down a notch when he feels he's playing with his power too much. I'm not sold on this idea that Strange fits this role but it helps to separate out some of the characters. I liked the idea that Richards is unaware that Doom has stolen his life. There are some ideas in here that make the book stand out a little bit.
The artwork is good but it is not as good as the event billing positions the book to be. I found some of the panels to be cloudy and a little confusing. The details seem to bleed out on some of the pages making scenes unclear. However, there are plenty of panels where the drama and emotions are captured really well. For example, the Richards-Doom confrontation is as powerful visually as the story makes it out to be in the comic. I enjoyed the art but was not blown away.
"Secret Wars" is becoming a story about Reed Richards and Doom. This particular issue brings the pair together in a confrontation that gets cut short by the conflicted, but power-balancer, Stephen Strange. The book makes poor usage of so much of the cast that I found myself questioning why they were even included. Twenty pages of Richards, Doom and Strange would have been enough for this issue I believe. The artwork is good but not as detailed as prior issues and not as polished as a top level event of this nature probably is required to be. This issue is mostly an average read that teases the theme of characters having too much power. It will be interesting to see where this is headed, but the layoffs between issues are about to get bigger, so it will require some patience. I mildly recommend this comic.
3.5 out of 5 Geek Goggles
