Reviewer: Daron Kappauff
Story Title: Legacy Of Fire part 1
Written by: Ryan Kinnaird
Penciled by: Ryan Kinnaird
Inked by: Ryan Kinnaird
Colored by: Ryan Kinnaird
Lettered by: Randy Gentile
Editor: C.B. Cebulski
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Holy T&A Batman! I seriously haven’t seen this much gratuitous T&A since Image’s heyday. I’m guessing Mr. Kinnaird’s intention was to try and cover it up (did you catch the joke there…good) by surrounding it in beautiful colors and all around wonderful art. Guess what…it didn’t work. If you saw the cover of this thing, you’ll know what I mean. For those of you that didn’t, here’s what it looks like.
Now as I said, I really liked the art. The pencils are solid and the coloring is amazing, but come on, the clothes these girls were in this comic just aren’t possible. There’s no way they would stay on their bodies even if they were statues, let alone jumping around fighting and such…
One thing that I didn’t like about the art was the very obvious last minute addition of all the character’s eyebrows and eye makeup. (And this atrocity isn’t relegated to the female characters either. All of the male characters also have poorly drawn eye makeup. I’m not sure which is worse, the fact that it’s poorly drawn of the fact that the male characters are wearing it.) It actually looks like someone went through and added this eye makeup and these eyebrows to MY copy of the issue, not the print run, with a felt marker. Not pen…MARKER. I’d rather have had none of the characters have eyebrows at all than have this last minute attempt ruin the art.
Now onto the story…and we’re done.
No seriously, there is no story. We get a bunch of back-story about the Phoenix entity and how it created Limbo as a home for its progeny on the first “catch-up†page, but the actual story of the issue was, well…somewhere off on limbo. (I also thought it was a bit off to have a huge catch-up page in the first issue of an original miniseries. If there was that much to tell why not put it in the actual comic? As all of my creative writing teachers used to say, “show us don’t tell us.â€)
Then there’s the dialogue. For whatever reason, the dialogue of this issue uses word balloons that are traditionally used for computers and things of that nature; a more squared off balloon rather than a circular one. Normally I would think this was odd, but considering the very stiff and stilted nature of the dialogue it fit just fine…In case that went over your head, that wasn’t a compliment.
There wasn’t much that I had to say about this book that was on the positive side. It does have some really beautiful art, but the absolutely (and I can’t use enough adjectives here) gratuitous amount of T&A just ruins it, along with those strange eyebrows. My final score would have been lower, but the pencils and coloring on this issue really were fantastic.
