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doomfans2018-06-15 12:01 am
nomadicwriter) wrote in doomfans2018-06-15 12:01 am
Marvel Two-in-One Annual
We open to a flashback of young Victor where his dad is teaching him stick-fighting and tells him that they can't help a beggar as he's not part of their Zefiro family and they barely have enough for themselves; power not charity is the way to help.
Back in the present, the team have split up and Doom and Ben are visiting another Castle Doom on the trail of another F4 energy signal. They find a dead AU Reed and another AU Doom. Our Doom tells his AU counterpart that there'll be no satisfaction in trying to kill this Ben or continuing to seek ultimate power; the only challenge left is to be human. AU Doom realises our Doom has encountered something he hasn't: "Something that broke you."
AU Doom decides he does indeed need a challenge, and invites our Doom to a stick fight sans armour. He ends up kicking our Doom around, saying our Doom has lost his fire and righteous anger. Our Doom finds a gadget on the belt of the dead Reed that beams his mind off to visit the new Council of Reeds while his body keeps fighting. He calls them arrogant fools for starting that whole Council business up again, but they claim they're doing it right this time by keeping their family ties instead of cutting them off.
Our Doom gets pissy and accuses the Reeds of having meddled with his mind during the events of Secret Wars. They use a device to step into his mind and see the blocked memories from after Reed won. Turns out our Reed meddled with Doom's memory to make him believe Reed was dead, so he could have a fresh start where he was no longer seeking power or fixated on besting Reed.
While they're chatting, the copy of Doom's body left behind kills the AU Doom. Doom tells the Council they have no right to judge him for that - his Reed has arrogantly messed with his mind, broken his cardinal rule by abandoning his family ("The dim-witted duo, whom I, for some reason, feel honour-bound to save!"), and this Council is definitely just going to end up exactly like the last.
The Council send him back, sad that they couldn't get through to him, and chat about how their new goal is to make sure no children suffer like he did and grow up to be Dooms. (Which is suspiciously close to the good intentions they started with last time...)
So. Not sure how to feel about this one. To be honest, I found several aspects a bit disappointing. It got off to a shaky start with that flashback, which is now using Doom's father to push the same line as Bendis did with his mother: this revisionist take that his parents were harsh people who pushed him to toughen up and be a proper von Doom, rather than the original version where they were kind and gentle people and it was their deaths that hardened him. The flashback stuff in this issue wouldn't be too bad on its own, but it's an overall trend I'm not keen on.
Also, I have to say the art (by Declan Shalvey this ish, with colours by Jordie Bellaire) felt kind of inconsistent and didn't work so well for me. The present-day sequences with a lot of detail and fairly bold inks and colours look nice, but a lot of the Doom-on-Doom fight scene and Council of Reeds stuff feels very bare-bones, with no backgrounds and minimalist inking and colouring. Maybe it's a deliberate stylistic choice, but if so I thought it was an unfortunate one, because it makes some pages seem pretty rushed and unfinished to my eyes.
More shallowly I just don't like Shalvey's version of unmasked Doom at all (he even looks like Julian McMahon's movie Doom in some panels) and the colourist committed one of my ultimate pet peeves and gave Doom green eyes instead of brown throughout. It's not bad art by any means, but it feels like a step down from the high standards set by Cheung, Schiti and Maleev. (I feel a bit like I've been monkey's pawed for complaining about getting bored of Maleev's dark and shadowy style: nooo, not like this, I meant I wanted more bold cartoony colours, not a load of minimalist whitespace!)
I can't quite decide what I think of the Council of Reeds and Secret Wars stuff, either. It feels like there's not really much to it, to be honest. We get one very brief flashback to post-Secret Wars that doesn't really add anything but the retcon of some memory-meddling, which is promptly undone at the same time we learn it had happened. (Until this point I'd just assumed Doom was secretly aware Reed was alive, and if anything the plot made more sense that way.)
I don't know, I feel like I may be judging this overly harshly because a quick flick through of the art and having two pet peeves pop up in the initial flashback gave a bad first impression. Mostly it just seems kind of nothing-y, which is often the case with annual stories, I suppose. (Definitely doesn't feel like you'd have missed much by skipping it.) There's really nothing overly wrong with it, but I suppose I was just hoping for a bit more than we got here. I guess it remains to be seen whether there'll be any follow-up on Doom's encounter with the Council or this is just a random interlude.
Back in the present, the team have split up and Doom and Ben are visiting another Castle Doom on the trail of another F4 energy signal. They find a dead AU Reed and another AU Doom. Our Doom tells his AU counterpart that there'll be no satisfaction in trying to kill this Ben or continuing to seek ultimate power; the only challenge left is to be human. AU Doom realises our Doom has encountered something he hasn't: "Something that broke you."
AU Doom decides he does indeed need a challenge, and invites our Doom to a stick fight sans armour. He ends up kicking our Doom around, saying our Doom has lost his fire and righteous anger. Our Doom finds a gadget on the belt of the dead Reed that beams his mind off to visit the new Council of Reeds while his body keeps fighting. He calls them arrogant fools for starting that whole Council business up again, but they claim they're doing it right this time by keeping their family ties instead of cutting them off.
Our Doom gets pissy and accuses the Reeds of having meddled with his mind during the events of Secret Wars. They use a device to step into his mind and see the blocked memories from after Reed won. Turns out our Reed meddled with Doom's memory to make him believe Reed was dead, so he could have a fresh start where he was no longer seeking power or fixated on besting Reed.
While they're chatting, the copy of Doom's body left behind kills the AU Doom. Doom tells the Council they have no right to judge him for that - his Reed has arrogantly messed with his mind, broken his cardinal rule by abandoning his family ("The dim-witted duo, whom I, for some reason, feel honour-bound to save!"), and this Council is definitely just going to end up exactly like the last.
The Council send him back, sad that they couldn't get through to him, and chat about how their new goal is to make sure no children suffer like he did and grow up to be Dooms. (Which is suspiciously close to the good intentions they started with last time...)
So. Not sure how to feel about this one. To be honest, I found several aspects a bit disappointing. It got off to a shaky start with that flashback, which is now using Doom's father to push the same line as Bendis did with his mother: this revisionist take that his parents were harsh people who pushed him to toughen up and be a proper von Doom, rather than the original version where they were kind and gentle people and it was their deaths that hardened him. The flashback stuff in this issue wouldn't be too bad on its own, but it's an overall trend I'm not keen on.
Also, I have to say the art (by Declan Shalvey this ish, with colours by Jordie Bellaire) felt kind of inconsistent and didn't work so well for me. The present-day sequences with a lot of detail and fairly bold inks and colours look nice, but a lot of the Doom-on-Doom fight scene and Council of Reeds stuff feels very bare-bones, with no backgrounds and minimalist inking and colouring. Maybe it's a deliberate stylistic choice, but if so I thought it was an unfortunate one, because it makes some pages seem pretty rushed and unfinished to my eyes.
More shallowly I just don't like Shalvey's version of unmasked Doom at all (he even looks like Julian McMahon's movie Doom in some panels) and the colourist committed one of my ultimate pet peeves and gave Doom green eyes instead of brown throughout. It's not bad art by any means, but it feels like a step down from the high standards set by Cheung, Schiti and Maleev. (I feel a bit like I've been monkey's pawed for complaining about getting bored of Maleev's dark and shadowy style: nooo, not like this, I meant I wanted more bold cartoony colours, not a load of minimalist whitespace!)
I can't quite decide what I think of the Council of Reeds and Secret Wars stuff, either. It feels like there's not really much to it, to be honest. We get one very brief flashback to post-Secret Wars that doesn't really add anything but the retcon of some memory-meddling, which is promptly undone at the same time we learn it had happened. (Until this point I'd just assumed Doom was secretly aware Reed was alive, and if anything the plot made more sense that way.)
I don't know, I feel like I may be judging this overly harshly because a quick flick through of the art and having two pet peeves pop up in the initial flashback gave a bad first impression. Mostly it just seems kind of nothing-y, which is often the case with annual stories, I suppose. (Definitely doesn't feel like you'd have missed much by skipping it.) There's really nothing overly wrong with it, but I suppose I was just hoping for a bit more than we got here. I guess it remains to be seen whether there'll be any follow-up on Doom's encounter with the Council or this is just a random interlude.
no subject
I also personally really didn’t care for kid Doom beating up an old beggar, and I can’t emphasize that enough lol. And I kind of liked not knowing what happened right between SW and Doom’s reintroduction into 616, I preferred the mystery.
no subject
I could have lived with young Doom beating up the beggar if it wasn't for the rest of the retcons with his parents. If it was played as him being angry enough but his dad stopping him or being disappointed with him afterwards, it would fit much better with the idea that it's the loss of that loving family that took the brakes off his darker side and led to him becoming a villain. But the way it's written in this issue, it just seems like his dad would probably encourage him to do it or just not care either way because the guy's not Zefiro. :/
And I wouldn't have minded them following up on Secret Wars if it had actually added something, but this was just filling in stuff that's implied by the original story anyway. We already knew Reed had sent him back to make a fresh start, and although it wasn't previously clear Doom genuinely thought Reed was dead, if that had become obvious, then, duh, Reed deliberately messing with his memory was the only possible explanation. They could have saved that revelation for when he was finally reunited with Reed, or just left the question of how much Doom really knew ambiguous the whole way through. (Because really, I feel like his role in this story made 1000% more sense when I thought he knew the others were still alive and was manipulating Ben and Johnny to help reunite them. If we're supposed to take all his early scenes at face value he comes off much cheesier and less interesting. Though I guess we could go with the theory he thought Reed was dead but was still deliberately manipulating Ben and Johnny into taking on this quest to shake them out of their depression or something.)
no subject
Yeah, I don't get Doom's motive then if he genuinely thought Reed and Sue were dead? Ben even asks him in the annual and he's evasive. If this was an obvious turn for villainy, I'd guess it was some vague nefarious purpose, but now it's... what, him guarding/watching them? I don't love that he was in the dark, but working with what we have, lol that's oddly sweet, considering Reed apparently left Ben and Johnny behind to do the same for Doom. 'Aren't you a better man with family', awww lmao. Sentimental old coots.
(Too much to ask for some positive reconciliation/reunion in FF #1? Heart wants what it wants!!)
no subject
Yeah. "I want to know what Reed's doing out there and I need you two to find him, so I'll manipulate you into searching even though you think he's dead," makes perfect sense as a Doomy motive. Without that element, you've got, what, "You two seem to be having trouble getting over your grief, let's all go on a quest together to get some closure and bond"? Okay! (In retrospect, it's also pretty hilarious that Reed's response to Doom claiming his wife and kids for his own in Secret Wars was apparently, "Well, okay then, if you want in on the whole F4 family thing I'll leave Ben and Johnny for you to hang out with." It's almost like he's trying to encourage Doom to learn to bond with the family members he doesn't like so much after he's proven he can get on okay with the others.)