Weekly Awards For The Comic Book From August 6, 2008

All right, let’s go ahead and dish out The Revolution’s weekly awards.

The nominees for the Che for the best read of the week:

Avengers/Invaders #4
Final Crisis #3

The Winner: Final Crisis #3

I enjoyed Krueger’s latest effort on Avengers/Invaders #4. This has been a fun ride so far and it has been great to see Marvel’s Golden Age getting a little love and respect. This has been a balanced read with plenty of good character work and plot development as well as some entertaining action scenes.

However, I had to give The Che for the best read of the week to Final Crisis #3. Despite its flaw of not being new reader friendly I am still completely enjoying this story. Morrison is crafting a tale that is epic in scope. I am enjoying how every aspect of the DCU is being touched on in this tale. For continuity buffs like myself it just does not get any better than this.

And now the nominees for the Sequential Methadone Award for the worst read of the week:

Hulk #5
Invincible Iron Man #4
The Twelve #7
Trinity #10

The Winner: Invincible Iron Man #4

There were certainly more disappointing reads this week than there were quality reads. I hate it when I get stuck with a week like this. Hulk #5 was simply a dumb issue. This issue reads like Loeb is on crack. I have said it before, but it bears repeating. I am totally shocked at how bad Loeb has been with Marvel. I really enjoyed Loeb’s work over at DC and have a hard time reconciling the Loeb with DC and the Loeb we are getting with Marvel.

Hulk #5 presented us with Loeb punking out Thor to the red Hulk. Eh, that just did not work for me. Personally, I am placing my money on the God of Thunder to kick more ass than what we got in this issue.

Hulk #5 gives the reader tons of action and absolutely no substance at all. There is no character work in the least bit. The dialogue is sophomoric. And there is an alarming lack of plotlines outside of the mystery of the red Hulk’s identity.

The Twelve #7 was another pathetic read. JMS gags up another preachy, plodding and pointless issue. The reader gets a heaping helping of overly dramatic and hackneyed dialogue. The entire issue was painfully predictable and banal.

Trinity #10 was another unimpressive read. This title is rapidly losing my attention. It is too bad because I do think that Busiek has the raw material for what could be an entertaining story. Unfortunately, that story is probably only designed to go for maybe 12 to 24 issues and not the 52 that Busiek is being force to artificially fill.

However, I had to give the Sequential Methadone Award of the week to Invincible Iron Man #4. This issue was another unimpressive effort by Fraction. Thom was much nicer to this issue than I would have been. This title continues to be a massive miss with me. I am a die-hard and long-time Iron Man fan. It is so depressing to go from the Knaufs’ incredibly rich, complex and intense stories to Fraction’s shallow, unoriginal and dull story.

Invincible Iron Man #4 was simply a boring read. We are now four issues into this story arc and pretty much nothing has happened. Honestly, Fraction could have easily reduced these past four issues into two very tightly written issues. I hate it when writers unnecessarily stretch out and fluff up thin and shallow story arcs.

Practically nothing at all happens in Invincible Iron Man #4. There is little plot development, no intriguing mysteries and absolutely no action at all. Unfortunately, Fraction seems to love the sound of his own voice as much as Judd Winick and cannot resist an opportunity to blah, blah, blah the reader to death with inane and pointless dialogue.

Fraction’s dialogue is amateurish. It is vacillates between being totally cheesy and goofy at times to being boringly generic. Tony’s dialogue is completely out of character as he ends up sounding like a total dope most of the time. Fraction writes an incredibly immature sounding Tony. The character work is also lacking as none of the characters are particularly fleshed out. And Ezekial Stane remains an incredibly one-dimensional villain.

And to top it all off, I get the feeling I am reading Matt Fraction staring as Tony Stark rather than Tony Stark himself. Fraction has absolutely no feel or understanding for Stark’s character. Also, it has become painfully obvious that Fraction has performed zero research on Iron Man’s comic book continuity and is instead looking to the Iron Man movie as his source material for Invincible Iron Man.

And drop the Tony Stark and Pepper Potts romantic relationship all ready. It makes the comic book read too much like the Iron Man movie. It is also intensely boring to read Tony in a monogamous relationship. And more importantly, Pepper is the wife of Tony’s dead best friend Happy Hogan.

For the love of god, Happy just died a little while ago. How long has Pepper mourned the loss of her husband before deciding to set her sights on Tony? A month? It is just gross. Of course, Fraction probably has no clue who Happy Hogan is other than being Tony’s chauffeur in the Iron Man movie.

So congrats to Final Crisis #3 for winning The Che Award of the week and “congrats” to Invincible Iron Man #4 for winning the Sequential Methadone Award for the week.