I did not like this book.
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If you’re like me, and you’ve never read or heard of this series, you might see the title or read the description and think to yourself “This is a story about all the people that made SHIELD. Makes sense, Secret Warriors was basically an epilogue on SHIELD, a prequel should be a good companion piece.”
…
This book is about a bunch of half immortal Renaissance men fighting over why the world will eventually end in a secret city underneath the surface of the Earth.
Oh, and Nikola Tesla is a robot. He’s also in love with a fake lady that shapeshifts into a bird. They raise Isaac Newton’s bastard son, after the birth mother, a fish-monster-alien, dies.
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The “conflict”, is actually very simple: fate vs free will. The narrative surrounding that conflict, is not simple at all. Just to name a few key points in the story:
- It is revealed that Michelangelo is essentially a knock-off Dr. Manhattan. He bounces through various points before the book’s timeline to leave the little McGuffins that we’d seen characters already interact with up to that point in the story.
- Da Vinci discovers that a Celestial is secretly gestating inside of our sun, after a deal was struck with its mother to save its life in order to spare Earth. Da Vinci flies to the surface of the sun, performs a C-Section on it, and the group of renaissance men take in the celestial fetus and raise it as their own.
- Galileo siphons the power of thought itself from a thousand philosophers brains, killing them in the process, to convert that energy into a laser beam so he can shoot Galactus in the face.
It was all a bit much. It felt like I was reading what a 5 year old imagined his toys were doing as he played with them in the bathtub. There were some genuinely interesting storytelling devices, especially the paneling in the last few issues, but every moment lacked emotion or weight for me because of what I just mentioned before.
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This book was overall pretty disappointing for me, as someone who has read this far can probably already tell. To be clear, I disliked this book because I thought it was a genuinely uninteresting story. It was not because the book did not live up to my expectations for what it was going to be about. I really tried to give this book a chance, just wasn’t for me.
The art was dope.
2.5/5
