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NIGHTCRAWLER #1
"Passion Play Part One: Rising Dark"
Neutral (3/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Chris Kipiniak
Pencils: Matthew Smith
Inks: Mark Morales
Colors: Hi-Fi Design
Letters: Jon Babcock
Editors: Pete Franco
Price: $2.50 US/$3.75 CAN |
After a brief glimmer of hope from Iceman #1, the Icons mini-series returns to the familiar territory of completely unnecessary. I still have the Nightcrawler mini-series from the 1980s,
which was not terribly necessary either but was at least a fun ride that fit the
character's personality. This story tries to fit the light-hearted character
into a heavy-handed story about human slavery, and it works about as well as
you'd expect. It doesn't help that Smith's artwork has never been to my taste,
or that Hi-Fi's colors are a bit garish when working with his more dark and
muted style. Basically, none of the pieces of this creative team really seem to
match, and what we're left with is another Icons mini-series that wastes the
potential of its main character.
For the longest time, there
have been a few defining attributes to Nightcrawler: his religion, his
appearance and powers and his history as a German circus acrobat. Kipiniak makes
use of the religious aspect of the character, certainly one of the most unique
aspects, but he doesn't really do enough with the rest. One of the long-standing
rules of storytelling is that if just about any other character could be
substituted for the protagonist, you've got a bad story. Given the coincidental
introduction to the plot that Nightcrawler gets, I can easily see this story
belonging to any other super-hero. Kipiniak attempts to tailor the slavery angle
to Nightcrawler by having him talk about it with the priest he has befriended,
but it doesn't really make the premise fit him any better.
The plot is nothing all that intriguing in the first place, quite honestly. It might work in an episode of Law & Order, which has a tendency to be a bit
preachy, but in a world that has super-heroes and super-villains, it doesn't
really fit. The super-hero genre does not tend to fit with real world problems
very well, and though some writers can really make it work, Kipiniak doesn't
seem to be one of them. Kipiniak belabors the point, taking several sequences to
show us what is plainly obvious, that human slavery is wrong and that the people
behind it are bad guys. And we follow Nightcrawler as he acts like a detective,
tracking down leads, something that really isn't in his mindset or abilities
either. Which again gets back to my main problem, that this story doesn't really
seem tailored to Nightcrawler at all.
On the artwork front, the
book is also a bit uneven. Matt Smith has a style that reminds me of Mike
Mignola, and as I'm not a fan of pure Mignola, someone who is following his
style doesn't really win many points from me. I will say that Smith's work here
is some of his strongest, probably helped out considerably by Morales's inks,
but given that his style functions on darkness and shadows, Hi-Fi Design pretty
well murders it with garish and bright color.
As with the other Icons
series, this seems like something that only the most devoted fans of the
character will like. It's not a terrible story, but it is, in all ways,
completely average. I understand the business reasons for having the Icons
mini-series, so that any fan of a character can eventually have a trade
paperback to pick up devoted specifically to their favorite, but it would seem
that good creative sense would have been to make those stories more attuned to
what makes these characters favorites in the first place.
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