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.
- 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.