I spent most of last week revising for an exam (which went fine, thanks) and I'm moving house next week, so in all the chaos, I haven't actually read most of this week's comics.  So I'm going to keep it fairly short this week.  That's the idea, anyway.

To kick things off this week, the Domino miniseries finally lumbers to a conclusion.  In fairness, it should be noted that it was a considerable improvement on the first Domino series, which nobody even remembers any more.

This seems to have been a cursed book, but it's hard to work out quite why its production went so horribly wrong.  As I explained back in the review of issue #1, the history of the book is a train wreck all on its own.  Originally commissioned over two years ago, it was solicited for autumn 2001 but pulled from the schedules without explanation.  In January 2002, Andrew Lis (the editor then assigned to the book) gave an interview in which he said that the entire series was already fully pencilled, and that Brian Stelfreeze was just getting to work on the colouring for issue #1.

Despite that, it took a further eighteen months for the first issue to materialise.  And despite this being a fully written, fully pencilled series that's been lying in a filing cabinet for ages, it's still been over two months since issue #3 shipped.  The entire project of reeks of disaster, and it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that Marvel only published it at all because they hoped to recoup some of the production costs.  The book has been on the shelf for so long that when issue #1 shipped, it carried a credit for an editor who hasn't even worked for Marvel in over two years.

Whatever Marvel have been doing to the book in the intervening period, it hasn't helped tremendously.  In fairness, re-reading the miniseries as a whole, the plot does flow better than you'd think - all that disjointed running around from the first couple of issues works rather better on a second reading.  But the plot's still not all that good.

Since I suspect few of you actually stuck with the book till the bitter end, I'd better explain what the plot actually was.  Domino's search for her mother leads her to Project Armageddon, a US genetic research facility working on developing superhumans for use as weapons.  Domino's mother was a surrogate mother, and Domino was a failed test subject.  Domino's mother ran off and joined the, uh, Armajesuit religious sect, rescued Domino and sent her off to live a separate life.  Meanwhile, Domino's younger brother Lazarus remains in the custody of the Project.  The Armajesuits believe that Lazarus will destroy the world, so they've been following Domino round in the hope of getting her to locate the current Project base for them, in order that they can kill Lazarus.  Honestly, that's the plot.

It's all a bit of a mess, really, and the central problem is that it has nothing to say about the lead character.  The series got off to a reasonably promising start in that regard, with a string of observations about her cavalier overreliance on luck over planning, but soon lost sight of that in favour of a string of bizarre plot choices - a mixture of cliche and demented oddity - which left Domino's character arc relegated to the background.  On the one hand, you've got yet another corrupt government project working on human weapons; on the other, a truly warped concept such as the hidden cult of Armajesuits.  Not only are the Armajesuits unintentionally funny, but it's hard to see why they were supposed to fit with Domino - religion has never been a significant part of the character.

Somewhere in here there's a half-formed idea about Domino's luck powers being a failed version of her mother's precognitive abilities.  The idea seems to be that Domino's perspective is that chance is fluid and manipulated by her powers, whereas the mother's viewpoint is that time is fixed and Domino merely has a low-level power to know which way it's going to go.  That's actually not a bad idea - the nature of chance would be a good theme to explore in a Domino miniseries - but it never really goes anywhere in this book.  The closing pages seem to suggest that this was meant to be a key theme, but it doesn't work.

On the bright side, the book does look rather good, with Stelfreeze's stylised figures and saturated, sickly colour schemes.  The series has a deliberately unnatural look to it, dominated by secondary colours and weird lighting.  No doubt it's intentional that the book shifts into a more natural colour scheme in the last few pages.  I've always enjoyed Stelfreeze's work, and the visuals in this book are often very good indeed.

Not good enough, to however, to carry a failed plot.  A misfired series - but then, Marvel probably already know that, don't they?

Rating: C

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