(God, that joke never gets old)
Reviewer: James Hatton
Story Title: N/A
Writer: Zee Wells
Artist: Kaare Andrews
Colorist: Jose Villarrubia
Letters: VC’s Dave Sharpe
Editor: Warren Simons
Publisher: Marvel Comics
The movie tie-ins have begun. Now, for as much as I know he is ingrained into Spidey mythos, I never saw Doc Ock as that of anymore than a nuisance. OOOoo, somebody looks like an Octopus… kinda. Stay away from the big fat creepy guy with the big metal arms, he probably is some kind of deranged lunatic.. I mean seriously, if Octavius ever showed up in the real world, he would be the next Star Wars Kid or Subservient Chicken. The man just never seemed imposing in those old Spidey yarns.
Nowadays, he seems a bit more credible. With Bendis’ creepy yank your teeth out version, and the movie’s trench coat wearing version, and now this pre-pubescent Year One version, he still ain’t no Goblin, but he’s coming along nicely.
Story!
I can’t help feeling that I’ve read this story before. I’m not even setting this up for a punch line, but the whole story was a bit stale. The details AROUND the story were what kept my eye going.
Take one super-mecha-genius in Otto Octavius. Add a defensive mother, an abusive father, and school bullies. Walla! You get an evil genius. That’s your plot right there, and I’m sorry I ruined it. Now, where this story does shine a bit more, is the characterization of Otto himself, which is the most important part. Even in his youngest formative years, we see him as a smart kid who has a revenge streak in him that’s bigger than your pithy imaginations can comprehend; he is a genius and all.
It could be that I’m just a sucker for nuclear holocaust, and a bad guy questioning God.
Now, maybe it’s a nitpicky detail, but I’m going to throw this out there, because it got me a bit rankled. Yes, rankled. Otto goes to MIT, which is a good choice for your trendsetting nerd on the go, but at Wells’ MIT, there are just as many jocks to pick on the nerds. Now, out of the legions of bio-genetic engineers, computational calculus researchers, and people playing ‘Guess My Integer’, these jocks choose our lil’ Octy to pick on. If Wells had chosen any other school, I would have been ok with it… but MIT is the house that geek’s built.
Art!
Mmmm.. Inking…
From the first splash of Otto looking, with his MTV-ish bottle-cap glasses reflecting DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man, I knew that this book was going to look pretty good. You know what… it looks right on the money.
Every scene that is out in public is textbook character drawing. Every scene that has Otto plotting and schemeing (or fantasizing), is dark and moody and gritty and everything you want out of it. I think the dramatic reflections on Ock’s glasses in some of the darker panels is a little too Invader Zim’ish for my tastes, but for the rest of it – It’s golden.
Overall!
Usually, books that are supposed to aid and support people who are in it for the movie hype suck. (Remember those three X-Men Movie books… ugh!) This book makes no qualms about being a little cliché, because as they say, the devil is in the details.
Not having read all of the classic Spidey-tales of yore, I can’t say knowledgably as to whether this is a retelling of Doc’s history, or whether it’s a reinvention of his origin. I, personally, am not so pure with it as to care very much. I do know that I enjoyed the book for what it was, and am looking forward to reading the rest of it. That is all I ask of my comics, as should you.
