No Dazzle, but the skates are still there
Right before I picked this up, the guy in the shop asks, "you read the 80s stuff?", to which I replied "yep, they were terrible."
And they were terrible, but I understand what Marvel was trying to do with Dazzler back then and how she really didn't have a chance in the end. She was even going to be a fulltime new member of the X-Men after Beast and her had a thing, but it never happened.
This new one-shot might be like that. I guess Jim McCann and the creative team behind this wanted to bring the sudden end of the first Dazzler run and link it up (without us noticing two decades of sporadic appearances) to the future, which they have achieved. Old enemies are mentioned and, as you can tell from the cover, Dazzler gets to enjoy her old costume once again. But I am not sure nostalgia was enough here.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the trip down memory lane if anything. However, the one thing this issue is unable to do is show us where the excitement or staying power of Dazzler in any new issues will come from. That's where this one-shot falls down. Fair enough, a one time issue has to wrap up everything so the story has an ending, but what are we supposed to take away from this? I don't quite know.
On the plus side, the art was great and I liked the writing. The cover blew me away, and for a one-shot I think the story is well paced.
