battlepig's Flashpoint: The Outsider #1 - Part One: Shades of Grey review

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    Whose side are you on, anyway?

    Michael Desai is The Outsider, the morally corrupt and hard-to-pinpoint multi-billionnaire in the world of Flashpoint. However, that's all we'll learn of him.
     
    The Good

    • It's an entertaining read. Michael Desai is not obviously good or bad. And with him being a completely new character, we don't know what to expect. So that makes this really good. Throughout the entire book, we don't know what his agenda is, whose side he's on and what his goals are. We know he's got little to no hesitation to kill or have his minions be killed, but then he makes a weird attempt at saving the world. Just what is this guy after?
    • The art. It was refreshing, daring and absolutely fitting. Not overblown, hard to pinpoint again, because it has both typical villain shots of Desai and hero-poses. So even the art won't offer any clues as to who he is and what he's after. 
    • To shroud the character further in mystery, Desai is being given weird powers. None of which are explained despite an elaborate origin.
    • This Panel. It's a wonderful shot of maybe a tenth of a second where everything is in full motion and yet it seems so perfectly still. Brilliant panel.
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    The Bad:
    • Very little actually happens. In fact, if you look past the mystery of good/bad - which took them all of three pages to set up - nothing happens. Some fighting. Some talking about points we either don't care (techbabble) or we will never know the answer to (The stuff with Mister and Mrs. Terrific).
    • The Cover. It doesn't do the inside art justice. In fact, it's a pretty awful cover that has absolutely nothing to do with the inside of the book.
    • The story references a couple of lines of dialog that would probably be useful to remember. However, they happened two, almost three months ago, so I'm not going to remember them. And digging out the issue that's been safely tucked away in my longbox is out of the question.
     
    The Verdict:
    The Outsider is a fun ride with close to no story but awesome art and a main protagonist who's genuinely mysterious. And while I predict that this won't be essential to Flashpoint at large, I'd still buy it again if I had three bucks to spare and felt like a good, solid comic book starring a fresh, new character.

    Other reviews for Flashpoint: The Outsider #1 - Part One: Shades of Grey

      Intriguing story with good potential 0

      The Outsider was one of more intriguing books of the week. And in a week of subpar Flashpoint tie-ins, it's nice to find one that, for the most part, delivers.  James Robinson handles the story about Michael Desai, a mysterious character with stone skin and an enormous amount of money and influence within the Flashpoint world. You may remember him briefly from the recruitment conversation during Flashpoint #1. Here we learn a little about his birth and about his current status. While fleeting r...

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      Not picking Up the Next Issue 0

      This wasn't an entirely terrible issue but its not one of the better tie-ins.  Michael Desai is The Outsider but the issue is padded with mindless action, cliched backstory, and lack of story.  We open to the birth of Michael Desai.  His mother dies in pregnancy and his father disowns him.  However it doesn't matter because his powers cause a nuclear fallout that destroys a massive part of India.  He runs away from his orphanage later on.  So he has a tragic backstory but it really doesn'...

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