adamwarlock's Fear Itself: The Home Front #4 - Speedball in "Fatal Errors" part 4 of 7; Jimmy Woo [and the Agents of Atlas] in "The Age of Anxiety" part 4 of 4; A Moment With... Kida of Atlantis; The Blue Marvel in "Legacy" review

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    Falling hard for Christos Gage

    If I could just review the installment of Christos Gage's Speedball story rather than this anthology issue as a whole, my rating would be much higher.  Unfortunately, due to three lackluster supporting features, the solid lead story suffers.
     
    Christos Gage and Mike Mayhew's Speedball story has been strong from the first issue and keeps getting better.  Between here and his work on Avengers Academy (also featuring Speedball), Gage shows he has a strong grasp on the character.  More than that, in this storyline, he's showing he has a strong VISION for the character as well.  Where for the past 20 or so years most writers have used Speedball for comic relief and made fun of him, Gage is taking him seriously.  After Civil War, Warren Ellis and Paul Jenkins took Speedball TOO seriously; the dark "Penance" period of his career being so grim it was absurd.  Toned down to a far more realistic level, and doing innovative things with his power set, Gage is believably remaking Speedball into not only a capable hero, but a powerhouse of one who can actually handle big threats singlehandedly.  This issue seriously made me want to cheer.
     
    Unfortunately, the rest of the comic is pretty poor.
     
    Peter Milligan's Agents of Atlas story wraps up in a bit of an awkward mess that renders the entire 4-part story largely trivial.  It doesn't advance or truly expand the Fear Itself story and it leaves the Agents of Atlas characters in such a way that, whenever they next appear, if they made no reference to what transpired in this mini, it wouldn't matter one bit.  Really weak work from the usually very good Milligan (honestly, one of my favorite comic scribes of all time).
     
    One more, Howard Chaykin's "A moment With..." feature is trivial.  Again we get a one-off with a no-name character, giving a slightly different perspective on stuff we see transpiring in more detail elsewhere.  I love Chaykin and am always happy to have more work from him... but if this feature was left out of the 3 remaining issues of this title, I would hardly notice.
     
    The issue wraps with a one-off featuring Kevin Grevioux's "The Blue Marvel".  I didn't read that mini, so I have no connection to the character.  So right off the bat, this story was going to be a tough sell for me.  By no means would that be impossible, however.  Seriously; the previous issue of this series featured a random one-off starring CARDIAC; an incredibly obscure character who hasn't shown up in a decade that I had only the vaguest of recollections of, and I LOVED IT.  So this story could have likewise taken a character that many don't know or have any connection to, and made it accessible to new readers.  And in that, it completely fails.  This story left me completely cold and with zero interest in going out to track down a TPB of his miniseries.  I can't really imagine this story would do much for fans of the character's miniseries either.  I'm sure fans are happy that the character has resurfaced, however briefly, but I wouldn't be remotely surprised if those same fans were disappointed in this story as it really has nothing new to say or offer.  NOTHING happens here.  The story is inaccessible and it is BORING.

    Other reviews for Fear Itself: The Home Front #4 - Speedball in "Fatal Errors" part 4 of 7; Jimmy Woo [and the Agents of Atlas] in "The Age of Anxiety" part 4 of 4; A Moment With... Kida of Atlantis; The Blue Marvel in "Legacy"

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