Fear Itself #7

Fear Itself ends with not a bang or even a whimper. It ends with the sound of a head repeatedly smacking against a wall.in frustration at a story event that has been so dragged out and now manages to feel rushed and hollow as it comes to its conclusion.

It is really hard to know where to even begin about this issue. You know how you (or someone you know) has two weeks to write a paper but doesn't really write it until the last day? I think that works as an analogy for Fear Itself. Matt Fraction spent six issues screwing around and leaves it to the seventh issue to get down to business. As a result, it's a lazy effort with no depth that just goes through the motions of ending the plot and hitting the beats Fraction wanted to it.

For instance, take the Mighty. They are allegedly one of the big developments of this finale, and they amount to absolutely nothing in the story. Nothing is accomplished by this development, and the conclusion could have gone on without any real changes without it. We don't really even get a big throwdown between the Worthy and the Mighty, and is that not the entire point of having the Mighty? There are a few splash images of the Mighty vaguely fighting the Worthy and the rest of the Serpent's forces. It's nothing special. It's almost empty of cool one-on-one moments. In fact, there's really extremely little in the way of clarification of what the deal with the Mighty are. It amounts to a lamely ambiguous power-up for each character and leaves a lot of questions beyond simply what the hell do the weapons actually do for these characters. Why did Tony Stark make weapons for these characters specifically? I mean, Red She-Hulk? Iron Fist? I'm not disparaging the characters. I'm just at a loss for why Stark would think of characters he has so little connections to. What the hell even is Wolverine's weapon, anyway? By comparison to the Mighty, the Worthy are a substantial and well developed concept.

And for the record, the Worthy really are not a substantial and well developed concept. If you were hoping for something with the Worthy in this final issue, I am sorry. You aren't getting it. Fraction does not take this last operating to try to breathe some life into what was essentially the big hook of this event that really was lifted straight from the sort of gimmicks Geoff Johns is known for doing much better than this in his DC story events. For this entire story, I have been waiting for Fraction to delve just a little into who the Worthy are. Are they forgotten Asgardian gods? What is their mythology? What is their relationship with their hosts, which seems so inconsistently portrayed as it varies from possession to symbiosis? What even are their abilities besides being vaguely powerful? The Worthy have become less and less of a factor in this story as it has gone on, and that trend continues here. Their defeat isn't really even a defeat. It is one of those cheap defeats that are common in video games and weak even there. You beat the boss and all his lackeys auto-defeat. Yeah, that's basically how it goes down here. It really doesn't even make sense that the Worthy would be so dependent on the Serpent's bother given how so many issues were spent with the Worthy trying to build up the Serpent's power. I don't think they would have been very effective if they needed him to operate. But oh well, it serves as a quick and easy way for Fraction to end this story, which he needed since he wasted so much time getting to this point.

But really, the non-defeat of the Worthy is just a cheap moment in a story that has come to be defined by its reliance of cheap moments. The worst of these have been those geared toward gaining "cheap heat" from readers. You know what these are. They're moments that are major in and of themselves that you kind of expect to happen some time and just hope the context of them is worth their use. This is stuff like Stark falling off the wagon, the breaking of Captain America's shield, the end of Bucky Barnes' run as Captain America and the return of Steve Rogers to the role, a supposed three-way throwdown between Thing, Hulk and Thor, etc. In all of these cases, the story either failed to justify them or to live up to them. Actually, it was both in many cases. That trend continues in this issue. And you know what? I'm going to spoil it, because it is so irrelevant to the story that I can barely justify it as a real spoiler. Captain America picks up Thor's hammer. What happens then? Nothing. It's just another moment of cheap heat that has no substance to the story. We don't even get a cool American Thunder transformation or anything, which you would think would be the least that could be done. What makes these things so frustrating is how it cheapens these things. These should be really awesome moments in really awesome stories. Instead, they are being used in lieu of developing a genuinely interesting story in its own rights.

A perfect example of this is the crack that is now apparently a part of Captain America's shield. That is an awesome concept. It's a clever callout to another patriotic symbol, the Liberty Bell. So Cap having a crack in his shield should be a great idea. The problem with it is that it begs an immediate question. How did he get it? Unfortunately, his shield got cracked in this waste of a story.

The biggest thing here, of course, is the climatic battle between Thor and the Serpent. Although, it is not particularly climatic. They fight. What happens happens. It's not impressive. It's not clear why the Serpent was ever such a big deal. It's not clear why Thor's armor and magic sword allow him to fight the Serpent and comes off more like the Serpent is just being portrayed as weaker now to allow Thor to have this battle. At the risk of being redundant, that's pretty cheap. There is nothing especially bad about this, though. It's just very underwhelming, which is not a good thing for the main fight of a big story.

Normally, I could at least say good things about the art efforts of Stuart Immonen. That's not really the case this time. Look at the Worthy and then look at the Mighty. Notice the steep decline in quality? It's like Immonen got to read the script for this issue before designing them and put as much effort into designing them as Fraction did in writing them. A few are just glowing lines drawn over the usual looks. What happened? Did Immonen take a cue from Jim Lee and kick it up a notch by making the unnecessary lines drawn onto costumes glow?

This has become a long review, and I sadly have not even covered everything about this issue. You have Captain America poorly written as an idiot early in the issue with him facing off against the Serpent's forces with guns. There's Iron Man's weak excuse for not making Captain America a weapon by trying to say an indestructible shield should be just as good as these ambiguous god-weapons. The lack of the Thing in this finale is a big flaw considering what a large role he has had in the story. We have the return of Fraction's heavy hand trying to make things politically relevant. This is the second major event in a row ending with a major battle in the ruins of Asgard, and it pales in comparison to the last time. Going back to Cap and his guns. It's a pump action shotgun in one hand and what I think is a bolt action rifle in the other. How is he even firing more than once?

This doesn't even touch on the several epilogues, which are what makes this an oversized issue. They are more like setups for other books to buy rather than natural progressions of the story. A couple of them really depend on the idea that you aren't already sick of the elements of Fear Itself and want to read even more. The extreme mystery of what this business with Sergeant Johnson about really is too extreme to be compelling. It's just hammering you over the head with the idea that you should care but gives you absolutely nothing as to why. And if that is how Hulk and Bruce Banner split... um, I'm going to need a whole lot more than that.

There is nothing redeemable about Fear Itself as a story and as an event. I say this as someone who has generally been supportive of Marvel's big events. I liked Civil War, which Fear Itself so wishes it could be. I enjoyed Secret Invasion despite its flaws. I was very into Siege, which blows Fear Itself away as an event ending with a battle in the rubble of Asgard. This does not stem from any grudge against Marvel. This stems completely from just reading this story. It is a disaster of pacing, development and ideas.

Marvel put Matt Fraction up on a pedestal as one of their fabled Architects, and he just fell off the damn thing.