Like this week's JSA, Marvel Universe: The End is an old-fashioned super-hero throwdown. Unlike JSA, however, the emphasis is on old-fashioned, and while the artwork is pretty great throughout, the central story is ludicrous and the dialogue and characterization ranges from passable to downright awful. I'm all for the cosmic crossover, and Starlin did some fun stuff with his "Infinity" series during the 90s, but his choice of a fairly stupid new villain and inability to give the characters distinctive dialogue makes this more of a painful read than anything else. It sure do look purty, though.
The selling point of The End, in case I haven't made it clear at this point, is the art by Starlin, Milgrom and Christie Scheele. Starlin's art isn't always great; his take on the various X-Men shows pretty clearly that he's more comfortable with the old school costumes, for example, with the X-Women in particular looking like cheap streetwalkers rather than super-heroes. But when he's working with some of his old favorites like Thanos, Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom or the Thing, the art looks great. Starlin also has a sort of George Perez thing happening this issue, with a ton of crowd scenes. The most impressive one is probably the one with various easily-recognizable world leaders mixed in amongst a sort of futuristic Egyptian city.
Unfortunately, that scene also features one of the best examples of why The End doesn't work, the hokey and dated dialogue. Every world leader speaks in an ethnic stereotype (I can't decide if the return of Qaddafi saying "It's clearly an insidious Zionist scheme" or if Putin's "This is the big joke, no?" is funnier to me), and Starlin's name-checking of real world names like Cheney, bin Laden and Condoleeza comes off as just silly. By far the worst offender in terms of bad dialogue, however, is Spider-Man, who sounds more like an exposition machine filtered through a first-year philosophy student than his usual wise-cracking self. But in general, all of the dialogue is terrible.
There's also just a general feeling that Starlin wants this all to be important and weighty. The villain is the most powerful the cosmos has ever seen, the threat is the most dangerous the universe has seen, even Thanos is scared. So scared, in fact, that he's talking to his imaginary friend. Or breaking the fourth wall, I can't tell which, but either way I hate it and it looks clunky. The villain of the piece, a pot-bellied pharaoh transformed into a godlike being by aliens, is also just this side of stupid.
It's pretty clear that The End is supposed to be a deep, meaningful exploration of a cosmic danger that could mean the end of the Marvel Universe as we know it. However, clunky and overly ponderous dialogue, a complete lack of characterization and a ridiculously unthreatening villain make it read instead like something Marvel would have published in the 90s to prevent an Image title from gaining shelf space.
