The Last Heroes is something of a curiosity, an odd blend of the weird, edgy '90s sensibilities and classic '70s artistic style that gave birth to the book when it was called Edge in the '90s. Grant explains the context in the introduction and the afterword, and sells the idea of what the story is meant to be about, but honestly, I found those textual explorations of the story more effective than the story itself. Grant and Kane have some intriguing ideas here, exploring the nature of superheroes through a more realistic lens, but while it might have been more effective in the '90s, now it's competing with books that have done this kind of thing to perfection, including The Authority, Ultimates and hell, pretty much everything written by Mark Millar and Brian Bendis. The blend of Kane's old-fashioned art style with a story that purports to be more modern also causes a bit of a disconnect, and while I'm not a huge fan of the "decompressed" storytelling trend in general, I think that Grant's script tries to accomplish too much in too few pages, which is the opposite problem. The resulting effort reads like a Silver Age take on a modern age idea, and it doesn't quite work.
The central idea behind The Last Heroes, as explained by Grant in his text pieces, is fascinating. A world where there are just superheroes, no supervillains, and as a result, no black and white moral labels can really be applied to the characters. Unfortunately, the story never gets much beyond the story already explored in books like Squadron Supreme or Watchmen, and instead plenty of pages are spent on what reads like old school origins and backstory. The four issue structure just isn't big enough to encompass the type of story that Grant wants to tell, and the resulting story has a lot of payoff without enough setup, and the consequences don't really make themselves felt to the reader as a result.
Early on, the lead character kills one of the heroes. This is a driving point of the book, and yet it's hard to care, because we didn't really know that hero. Later, one of the heroes is revealed to have been involved in the murder of some of the others, years before, but the mystery isn't set up such that we care about the revelation, and in fact it comes off as the answer to a question that nobody asked. The climactic conflict, between Edge and another hero, likewise lacks punch because we haven't really seen this character built up on the page, but only in a few lines of dialogue between other characters. This is sort of the flipside of the overly decompressed modern superhero comics, where nothing really happens for issues on end. In Last Heroes, many things happen, but there's no context or deeper characterization to make us care about it.
I have to admit that I also feel that the art was not a benefit to the book. There can be no denying that Gil Kane was an influential master artist, but not every creator is suited to every project, and I couldn't help but feel that Kane wasn't the ideal choice for this book, even as he was the co-creator of it. It's hard to take these characters seriously when their costumes are garish, ugly things that look like they were built on '70s fashion. It's difficult to get wrapped up in the action when it's portrayed in such a straightforward manner. The big fight scene at the end should have been powerful, as a super-powered being did his best to take on a mostly non-powered adversary, but the layouts are stiff and functional, comparing poorly not only to the widescreen style that Last Heroes seems made for, but to more energetic classic layout guys like Kirby and Romita.
This review makes it sound like I absolutely hated Last Heroes, but that's not really the case. I just found it more interesting as a curiosity of a bygone age than as a story in and of itself. Certainly fans of Gil Kane's work will want to see his unpublished work, and there are some neat ideas behind the project. However, it's not really the strongest work of anyone involved, nor is it a particular landmark in superhero comics. Ibooks hasn't done themselves any favors by setting up expectations with a hardcover presentation and comparison to Watchmen on the back cover. As a cheap trade, this might be worth a look for fans of these creators and of superheroes, but in this deluxe format, it's hard to imagine a very wide audience. 5/10
