Death of the New Gods #8 Posted 29 Apr 2008 Writer: Jim Starlin Artist: Jim Starlin Letters: Travis Lanham Ink: Art Thibert Colors: Jeremy Cox Publisher: DC Comics  2.00 out of 5 Stars Reviewed by Adam McGovern

 

If the New Gods are gonna be in comics this bad, let ’em effing die. In the miniseries finale writer/artist Jim Starlin proves there’s something worse than musclemen in tights pummeling each other for thirty pages: B-movie deities shouting metaphysical plot summaries at each other for the same span.

“There’s none of the riveting philosophical riddles and genuine mortal peril of a masterwork like Thanos here.”

Though this is the wrap-up of an epic most associated with creator Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko’s is the spirit that hangs most heavily over this version, for good and ill. Starlin often applies and advances Ditko’s visual language of origamied spacetime and ectoplasmic combat stunningly, but he seems also to have paid too close attention to the overflowing mouthfuls of raw brainstorming with which Ditko long ago supplanted his actual dialogue and storytelling.

Starlin has well earned (and kept) his rep as the founding father of the conceptual cosmic epic, but there’s none of the riveting philosophical riddles and genuine mortal peril of a masterwork like his recent Thanos series here. Kirby created technological gods but realized that they’d still talk in mystifying terms; Starlin’s too-literal versions speak in numbing source code. The aridness undermines any real drama, and the fact that this saga is clearly just a gameboard-clearing before the same characters we see “dying” here are rebooted in Final Crisis next month depletes any emotional texture.

The latter aspect is an editorial edict that likely makes this finale read much more like an action-figure product insert than Starlin intended; his recent Captain Comet series was a new model of shaded characterization and chilling modern evil in classic space-opera trappings, so there’s no reason to think that his vastness needed to be so empty here (and some reason to speculate it didn’t start that way).

Kirby’s usually-ubiquitous (and, I had assumed, legally-obligated) creator credit has been suspiciously absent from these proceedings, but in this case, that may be a mercy. Starlin is one of the most mindblowing artists in comics, and visually remains at the height of his powers here. He’s also one of the field’s most skillful and interesting writers. Just not this time.

—CCdC—

 

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