Greg Horn in still on hand for a few painted pages this month, starting with an homage to the cover of ASM 39 with a monstrous Spider-Man towing Norman instead of the other way around, ho ho, no one’s done this before! The evil Spider-Man also has a mouth, and like so many attempts to make an evil Spider-Man since 1988, it just looks like Venom. He drops Norman to his death, and then Norman wakes up from his… dream or whatever. I still don’t really get it.
The unadulterated Poser-ness of this spread, especially panel 6, makes my teeth grind. Also Hand has straight up purple skin for some reason. One of the annoying things about Deodato’s stuff, before and after he started tracing the models, is how he made heavy shadow his signature thing. Heavy shadow looks cool, sure, but where are these shadows coming from? It’s the middle of the day, outside, why is everyone draped in shadow?? Answer: Who cares, that’s why. Quick look at the Sentry in his own dream prison whatever, then back to Hand, having been brough to Osborn by the Molecule Man. He says he rearranged some molecules in Osborn’s brain, but he put them back now. Hand is furious, but then the Sentry is there, zapping Molecule Man with his powers and saying, “I have this.” He rarely does!
Is the Sentry dying every single issue supposed to be funny? It’s certainly more funny than anything else. Hand finally succeeds is waking up Osborn as jets shoot missiles pointlessly at Molecule Man. But then he’s caught up in a conflagration and a warping of reality out of nowhere, because the Sentry has once again returned from the dead.
Across 2 stories, Ares has been frozen in mid-swing for something like 5 of this series’ 12 issues. Think about that.
Deodato just pasting in some random drawing there as Sentry’s creation is pretty funny. Norman tries his usual method of controlling Bob, and Moonstone pitches in a bit, but after declaring that he can’t die, Bob just says he’s going home and flies away. Moonstone says what happened with Scarlet Witch in Disassembled is nothing compared to this. I don’t know, it’s kind of the same exact thing, isn’t it? She can warp reality, Sentry can warp reality, they were both unstable, etc.
Cue another patented Bendis Osborn freakout, only at the end of this one…
Has Loki been behind all this the whole time? I don’t know, maybe, my memories of this are fuzzy. Likely in no small part due to how slight this business is. Not much ever happens. It’s a team book, but no one but Osborn, Hand and Sentry are really characters in it. Noh-Var disappeared and I didn’t even notice. Twice, I can recall feeling that way the first time through also. I guess this is trying to be all psychological and dark or whatever, Bendis openly trying to do what Warren Ellis did on Thunderbolts, but it simply doesn’t work. So little happens, and what does seems to repeat over and over. Every story ends with the team scared of the Sentry. Osborn gets incapacitated even more often than Bendis’ Iron Man did. This team goes to various locations and then don’t do anything of note and then go home. Or they just stay home while Norman talks to the press or the Sentry or Hand or himself. A team of villains pretending to be heroes with the authority to do whatever they want has potential for interesting material, but this is not that. It’s mostly running in place. And what of Dark Reign as a whole? Norman Osborn and his Cabal divvy up the world, and do… nothing. There’s no master plan, they don’t even have meetings. Osborn creates this villainous group to secretly run the world, and then spends his time trying to be a good guy on his own terms… for some reason? So much of this time feels like someone had an idea and then abandoned it. But, at least it’s nearly over. We’ve run it up to the big event that ends this era. Buuuut, before we see that, we have to turn back to the clock and catch up with New Avengers, which is now 6 months behind Dark Avengers on the ol’ blog.