The Comic Book Club: Jennifer Blood, Silver Surfer and Spider-Man

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DOUGLAS: I picked up Silver Surfer #1 on the strength of writer Greg Pak’s name, but I expected a lot more from the guy who wrote World War Hulk and The Incredible Hercules than this shabby mess of a first issue. This is Marvel’s fourth crack at an ongoing Silver Surfer series; I’d have hoped its first issue would have laid out what this incarnation is going to be about, or set a tone, or something. Instead, we get the big cosmic opening, then a jarring downshift to a domestic crime story, then a bit of high-tech ’90s stuff (the return of Cybermancer–!), and then back to a gunfight with the Surfer that has to have been going on for a couple of hours for the story’s chronology to cohere, and then the High Evolutionary shows up and does something that makes no sense at all…

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On top of that, Stephen Segovia’s artwork is flashy but awfully awkward. The scenes with the human characters have no sense of scale or distance–the first time we see the two cannon-fodder humans, they look like they’re actually running on the surface of the Rio Grande. On the third-from-last page of the story, something dramatically important happens to the Surfer’s board, but it’s impossible to tell what from looking at the page, even though (or maybe partly because) Segovia’s gone with a dramatic layout that has the Surfer’s head and board bursting from one panel into another. In general, throughout the issue, Segovia keeps electing to draw birds’-eye views, worm’s-eye views and heavily foreshortened poses rather than images that make it clear what’s happening on a basic storytelling level. It’s a cluttered, flailing comic book, and I have no interest in finding out what happens next in it.

EVAN: After the first cosmic sequence, I was really hoping that this book would turn out to be about Norrin’s dysfunctional relationship with Earth. And, yeah, it’s there in the subtext but I was hoping it come through to the foreground in a more significant way. Instead, Pak buries it underneath wishy-washy paramilitary drug lord/global peacekeeper nonsense. And then the High Evolutionary shows up. The High Ev never really did for me as a villain because he gets played as a ‘tweener a lot, and the Knights of Wundagore never seemed particularly menacing. Pak’s a great writer, especially when it comes to character nuance, but the earthbound stuff in this issue felt way too overheated and forced to me.

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As for the art, it just felt like Segovia was trying too hard. He’s got a bad case of new artist-itis, and tries to show off in every possible way that he knows how. The frantic, insecure storytelling that results makes a poor fit for a book that’s told through contemplative first-person narration.

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