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ELEKTRA #5
Mildly Recommended (5/10)
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Marvel Comics/Marvel Knights imprint
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: Chuck Austen
Colors: Nathan Eyring
Letters: Comicraft
Editor: Stuart Moore
Price: $2.99 US/$4.50 CAN |
After a promising start, I have to admit that I've become more than a little disappointed with Elektra. Austen's artwork,
originally quite impressive, looks rushed and sloppy this month, exacerbating
the weaknesses and all but eliminating the strengths, and it makes it really
hard to figure out what is going on in the story. It doesn't help that the
finale of the story relies so heavily on the artwork, or that it seems to rush
through some fairly important story elements when the rest of the tale had taken
a pretty leisurely pace. The ending to the story arc left me unsatisfied, with
unanswered questions and a feeling that the whole thing was a little bit
pointless.
To be fair, there are some
really interesting sequences in the book. SHIELD's arrival on the scene is an
effective visual when coupled with Fury's "bring the car around" and I loved the
feeling of maverick hotshots I got from their shooting down of the Hydra copter.
In addition, the exchange between Nick Fury and Elektra at the conclusion of the
story nicely sums up Bendis's views of both characters.
However, there's a lot more
to the book that either doesn't make a sense or feels rushed. Saddam's use of
the key is a fairly epic plot development, but it's over in the space of a few
pages, and given how slowly the revelation about Stanley LMD came in, his part
in the plot disappears quite quickly as well. I think that the feeling we were
supposed to get was that all of this big stuff came together and then
disintegrated really quickly, but what I got instead was a feeling that the
story could have used another issue's worth of space to tell.
My major complaint, however,
is the artwork. Austen's work at first was very impressive, and I couldn't
believe it when I was told it was done by computer modeling. However, the
stiffness in combat sequences continues to be a problem, and this issue it looks
like the artwork didn't have much time dedicated to it. The detail is gone,
replaced by overly simplistic figures that don't have much room for emotion and
epic sequences that are rendered mundane by their lack of scale. In addition,
the overly dark coloring continues to make the whole thing hard to read and
understand.
Finally, the ending of the
story hinges on a revelation about what Elektra was doing telling the story to a
potential target in the first place. Unfortunately, neither the artwork nor the
dialogue provides us any clues as to who this target is, or what connection he
really has to Elektra, and so the ending wound up mystifying me, rather than
impressing me.
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