mysteriousmre's Reviews (1.22k)

A co-worker recommended me this series and I’m glad I checked it out! The plot isn’t the main attraction here, it’s honestly just an excuse to put everyone in a setting where they have to figure out how to survive on monsters you’d find in a Dungeons and Dragons game. While the lack of fleshed out characters knocks this down a star, the author does a phenomenal job building the world, ecosystem, and food chain of this multilayered dungeon. It’s a fantastic exercise in world building and one I’m interested to read more about. I don’t think this will suit everyone’s tastes (pardon the pun), but for me it hit just the right notes to leave me hungry for more. I’m definitely coming back for seconds.

This iteration of Scream shows a lot of promise. The book has a good lead in the form of Andi (Agent Venom’s former sidekick, Mania), it has one of the best supporting cast members in comic history, Aunt May, and the book is coming out during a time when symbiotes are actual characters and more popular than ever. So what went wrong? For starters the book has a good bit of filler. Scream encounters the main antagonist of the book, Big Mama (Marvel’s iteration of Grendel’s Mother from the Beowulf myth) and then just repeatedly gets captured and breaks free. The forms Scream takes to escape are cool (shout outs to the art team for all their cool monster designs), but when the same thing happens again, and again, and again in the SAME SPACE for multiple issues the book gets very boring and feels padded out for no reason. Another strike against the book is the way the flashbacks are handled. I’m all for seeing more of Thor fighting symbiote dragons, but the accompanying narration was excruciating. I don’t know if the text was the story of Beowulf verbatim, but I remember hating the old English of the original myth and this was a slog to read through. Eventually I stopped reading the text in these sections and just followed the visuals, as the art did a great job showing the action and Thor traveling throughout the realm hunting Big Mama. I don’t really have any strong feelings about this book being cancelled, but I hope Andi gets another shot at stardom sometime soon.

A crazy conclusion to Morrison’s work on Action Comics that’s confusing on its own, but when read alongside the previous volumes makes for a magnificent payoff for all the side stories and tangents. Morrison is famous (and infamous depending on who you talk to) for his high concept, time traveling, multiverse spanning stories. Because of this he’s the PERFECT writer to tackle the 5th dimensional character of Mxy (no I’m not writing out that full name). His explanation for how Mxy’s actions affect Superman the way they do makes perfect sense, and while the amount of Superman mythology makes for a really dense read, I found it really rewarding. I’m glad I took the time to read this.