newuniversal #1

Writer: Warren Ellis
Artist: Salvador Larroca
Colorist: Jason Keith
Letterer: Rus Wooton


It’s a world very much like our own and at the same time vastly different. The Chinese rule space and have bases on the moon. Paul McCartney was shot instead of John Lennon. And on March 2nd, 2006 a mysterious blinding light covered the Earth. Now several people throughout the world awake from this “White Event” to discover strange new abilities, which threaten to destabilize their lives.

There’s nothing too new about Warren Ellis’ reimagining of Marvel’s failed second wave of comics from 1985, The New Universe. When I first heard about this book late last year I felt a mild tingle of anticipation. After all, Ellis has made quite the comeback over the last few years, reasserting himself as one of my favorite comic book writers. But as the date for the book’s release drew closer my anticipation of it dwindled, a combination of my general lack of interest in comics featuring characters with super powers and my reluctance to read yet another reimagining of a failed superhero concept from the 1980’s. Plus, the name newuniversal, Ellis’ “modern twist” on New Universe, just sounds dumb. Sounds like the name of a delivery service or something

Still, when I saw the opportunity to read and review an advance copy of the book I figured I should give it a try before completely dismissing it. After all, Ellis is writing two of my favorite books right now and Larroca had apparently stepped his art up to a new level of quality. Sadly I found myself unimpressed by both the writing and the art.

With newuniversal, Ellis has fallen back on his old “look how clever I can be” style of writing, which drove me away from his work a few years back. He spends more time trying to wow you with his newsfeed style captions and how much he knows about theories on Sumerian culture than he does on actually creating interesting characters that you might actually give a crap about or weaving any sort of linear story. He also abandons his recent experimentation with compressed storytelling with a comic that is quite painfully decompressed, stretching what should have been 10 pages worth of story into a whole issue.

Larroca’s art was an even bigger disappointment than Ellis’ story. I really expected more out of this artist who used to be one of my favorites. I once went as far as buying the Chris Claremont written X-Treme
X-Men just to see his gorgeous pencils. Now it looks as if he’s adopted the Greg Land approach drawing comics, tracing all of his characters right out of a magazine. All of the main characters don’t just look sort of like famous actors and actresses. They look exactly like them. When you’re reading a book with a character that looks exactly like Gene Hackman but he’s supposed to be talking with a cockney British accent you can’t help but get distracted from the story itself.

All in all I’d much rather reread Supreme Power, a better reimagining of an 80’s Marvel property about a “real world” suddenly infected with uncontrollable super people, than sit through another issue of newuniversal. Especially if I’m going to have to wade through 26 pages worth of ads just to find the story every month.
 

Special thanks go out to Jeremy Shorr, owner of Titan Comics for allowing us to use his advance preview books for review purposes.

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