The Comic Book Club: “Brightest Day” and “Bring the Thunder”

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DOUGLAS: Moving on to Bring the Thunder #1–Can this really be the second-lowest-selling Dynamite book ever, as Bleeding Cool claimed, or is it just the second-lowest-selling Dynamite first issue? In any case, that Alex Ross cover gives the game away: this is yet another movie pitch dressed up as a comic book, and the indicia confirms it (the trademark and copyright are co-owned by something called State Street Films).

You can see Jai Nitz trying to pull out something interesting here–I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a standard-order punch-em-up gussied up with captions about listening to David Bowie and Mothership Connection before–but there’s just no room to do much with this airless, cliché-ridden one-character plot (in some ways, I feel like I read this in significantly better form a few weeks ago as the first issue of Soldier Zero, except for the climactic scene here, which might have been lifted from Watchmen instead). Wilson Tortosa’s artwork is hard for me to swallow, too: it’s very solid storytelling, for what little story there is (lots of big three-and four-panel pages devoted to sequences that don’t need anywhere that much room), but every time we see somebody’s face it looks like the work of a promising high-schooler.

(More on Techland: The Comic Book Club: Batman: The Return and Batman Inc.)

GRAEME: Yes! Thank you for putting whatever my problem was with the art into words. There’s nothing wrong with Tortosa’s art, per se, but it doesn’t really look… finished, I guess? Or ready for this type of book, perhaps. It’s odd. I like that he’s not an artist who’s trying to follow Alex Ross’s style or whatever the superhero flavor of the month may be, but there are parts in this issue where his pages just don’t really work, and it’s nearly always based around figure work and especially faces.

DOUGLAS: Mostly, though, what I object to about this comic is that it’s being sold on the strength of Alex Ross’s name, and he doesn’t seem to have had much to do with its contents. Character creation is not what’s interesting about Ross’s work, and this seems like it’s one step away from a James Frey/Full Fathom Five situation.

GRAEME: This isn’t necessarily something new for Dynamite. Ross is also the selling point for the Project Superpowers books, and while I believe that he’s very involved with the core series, I don’t really know how much he’s actually providing to the spin-offs, even though he’s listed as co-plotter for all of them.

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DOUGLAS: Speaking of Shakespeare quotes: writers who are sensitive to quotations’ original context might want to avoid having the very first page of their comic book include a caption that reads “Neither one of us is flesh and blood anymore. We’re just sound and fury now.”

EVAN: Douglas, I thought the same thing about the Macbeth reference, and sadly, Bring the Thunder doesn’t wind up signifying very much. I was intrigued to see what Dynamite–that bunch of IP acquisition fetishists–would do with an original idea. This first issue has one of the most off-putting openings I’ve read in ages. The tortured music metaphor did aim at something interesting, but felt really dissonant from the action happening in the scene. It sure wasn’t the tired ol’ typical punch-exposition-punch superhero structure, but the difference didn’t make it appreciably better. And the bridge talk tied in with impenetrable military jargon didn’t help. I appreciate that Nitz did the research, but it’s supposed to disappear into the writing, not hit you over the head.

GRAEME: I agree that the bridge sequence just didn’t work, but I’m clearly the optimist of the group on this one: I liked the fight scene much more than I expected to, and it’s pretty much because of the dissonance between the visuals and the music-based monologue. It was as if someone had given Jonathan Lethem the pages and told him to just come up with whatever he wanted as some captions. Maybe I’m just filled with the holiday spirit, but if you’d removed the flashback sequence/forced military jargon, I’d happily say that I really enjoyed the first issue. I’ll definitely check out the second to see where it’s going, anyway.

EVAN: The one-character thing is a big problem here, because, again, you can tell that Nitz has thought a lot about Wayne Russell and how to give the reader a sense of his facets. But he’s got no one to bounce off of. Russell narrates the whole issue and pretty much dominates all the spoken dialogue, too. The singular focus winds up feeling boring. As I read Bring the Thunder, I (unironically, mind you) was comparing it to DC’s THUNDER Agents reboot. That wasn’t perfect, but Nick Spencer did a great job of establishing tone, juggling multiple characters and pushing along a fast-moving plot. I kept waiting for the twist in this book, but even the surprise ending of BTT just felt like a bad cover version of better stuff done elsewhere.

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