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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
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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.”
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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—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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