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Bill Jemas is not a popular man.
Of course, given that he goes out of his way to cultivate that
reputation, I doubt that keeps him awake at night.
Personally, I find his online persona quite amusing.
Nothing wrong with a bit of stirring.
Nonetheless, the knives were out
for Marville. Many people wanted this book to
fail. And they, at least, have reason to be pleased.
Because Marville #1 looks at the knives, charges
bravely forward, and impales itself on every single one.
Through the throat, through the eyes, and through the foot.
I have nothing against Bill Jemas,
and I did not have my knives out ready for this book.
Jemas seems to have had some decent ideas in the past,
although there's a big gap between that and being able to
actually write a story. Still, I was open to this book
being good.
It isn't. It's fucking
dreadful. This is amateur hour at Marvel Comics, a
publisher which has better things to do with its time than
turn itself into a vanity press.
For those of you who haven't read
it - and in the interests of your sanity, I can only hope that
this is a clear majority - Marville is a comic book
about comic books. Of course, this is exactly the sort
of insular comic which Jemas attacked Peter David for writing
in the feud which started the whole U-Decide fiasco in the
first place. But I'm prepared to let that slide.
The whole thing is a joke, and Marville is plainly
intended to be just a fun, throwaway effort.
Nothing wrong with that, as such.
But the premise does sort of hinge on the book being funny at
some point. And what we have here is a comic that's
really just an extension of Jemas' most repetitive running
joke: he doesn't like Paul Levitz.
The problem is that there is
absolutely nothing to this comic besides the in-jokes, and
they require you to buy into the questionable premise that
bashing Paul Levitz is inherently funny. It's funny, in
small doses, when Jemas insists on working it into completely
unrelated interviews. But it's not remotely funny as an
end in itself - it's just rather pointless bashing of the
opposition, which isn't done here with sufficient wit or
invention to make it entertaining.
The plot (such as it is) goes
like this. Several thousand years in the future, AOL
rules the world. Believing that the world is going to be
destroyed, Ted Turner uses a makeshift time machine to send
his teenage son Kal-AOL back to the present day. There,
Kal-AOL decides for no real reason at all to be a superhero.
Cue pastiches of various origin stories, all with thoroughly
lame payoffs, which the closing scene suggests are supposed to
illustrate the inferiority of DC origin stories. Quite
why Spider-Man's origin story is in there, in that case, I
have no idea.
All reviewing of comedy comes
down to one simple question: is it funny? And the answer
is no. It's badly constructed, poorly timed, utterly
lacking in characters or plot, but most of all it just isn't
funny.
Mark Bright is drawing this.
I can only hope he was well paid. There's nothing wrong
with the art here, but it has absolutely nothing to work with.
Normally I'd mark the book up a couple of points for the
artwork, but there's just nothing worse than comedy which
isn't funny. It's painful to read. A comedian who
dies on stage does not get extra marks for wearing a nice tie.
I have nothing against Bill Jemas,
I really don't. But this is just appalling.
Rating: D-
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