Any reviewer, no matter how friendly and well-intentioned, gets a tingle of schadenfreude when they realise that they are reading a heavily-promoted disaster.  By the time I'd finished reading Nick Fury's Howling Commandos #1, that tingle was so strong that I raced off to see if I could use it to power a 20 watt bulb.

All too often, Marvel launch new books by simply booting them out into a cold, uncaring world, with little or no publicity, and hoping for the best.  Howling Commandos is not one of those books.  Not only was it trailed with three page previews across much of the Marvel line, but its launch forms the centrepiece of a curious horror theme for the October books, complete with the Marvel Monsters one-shot and a tie-in Official Handbook.  In short, Marvel are serious about this one.

I can see how it might have looked good at the pitch stage.  The premise is that SHIELD have pressganged a bunch of horror characters and monsters into forming a secret unit to fight other weird things.  Okay, it's a little goofy.  But in the right hands, it could work.  And Keith Giffen, with his warped sense of humour, is the sort of writer who might pull it off.  I'd certainly have been tempted to commission it.

But good god, what an unholy mess.

Giffen is an inconsistent writer.  Sometimes he's hilarious, sometimes he's zany, sometimes he's relatively straightforward.  Sometimes his narratives are linear, sometimes they're utterly cryptic.  At his best, he can produce books like Justice League or the surprisingly decent Drax miniseries currently underway.  At his worst, he writes comics like his most recent Suicide Squad run, which featured exposition so garbled as to render the comic incomprehensible to anyone without  a degree in DC continuity, and inordinate amounts of time that they were prepared to spend on working out the plot.

Howling Commandos is another Suicide Squad.  Even after multiple readings, exposition is fractured and confused.  Key characters and concepts are badly introduced or not introduced at all.  Even after multiple readings, it's a horrendous mess.

Let me give you an example of how ineptly this book is written and edited.  After reading it through once, I realised that I couldn't remember the names of any of the lead characters.  So I read through it again, and this time I took notes.  Even then, I could only identify the names of three of the lead characters.  I then crossreferenced with the Howling Commandos' entry in this week's Official Handbook, whereupon I discovered that (a) one word which seemed to be a name from the context wasn't one at all, and (b) four of the lead characters aren't named anywhere in the comic.

I mean, really... identifying the lead characters?  Isn't that kind of basic?  There's even an entire page of two characters looking at the Commandos' files and spending a panel on each of them, and it still doesn't include their names!  How in the name of god do you miss out something as fundamental as that?

Giffen's fractured narratives are only partially comprehensible when he is partnered with a clear, direct artist.  In this series, he has Eduardo Francisco, whose art is neither clear, nor direct, nor attractive, nor (for the most part) intelligible.  And when I say it's hard to follow, I don't mean vague feelings of "What's going on here?"  I mean "What character is that meant to be?  What am I supposed to be looking at?  Which way is up?"

This is a truly dreadful comic.  The fact that it got commissioned is understandable, because the premise isn't inherently bad.  The fact that it made it past the editors in this form is remarkable.  The fact that Marvel saw this material and thought it merited a three-page preview across the line is mindboggling.  Only the glimmer of a decent premise saves this from a rock bottom rating.

Rating: D

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