Poor Mojo's Two Minute Hate

ONSLAUGHTREBORN #1: There's a page in here, with a close-up of Franklin Richards as he's holding some kind of magic ball that's never explained, where you can see Rob Liefeld really trying as an artist. I'm not being sarcastic at all; the close-up is not a traditional Liefeldian face at all - there's clearly been an attempt at observation into what people actually look like. Sadly, the same can't be said of the rest of the book, which is full of exactly what you'd expect from a book that's aimed directly at readers who thought that it was time to revisit Marvel's creative lowest point.... It's an Awful mess, albeit a brightly-colored one that's probably exactly what the target audience wanted.

ULTIMATE POWER #2: It's Generic Marvel Plot #1: Heroes met, have a misunderstanding and fight. The problem is in the executionwhich shows up just how mismatched Brian Michael Bendis and Greg Land are; Bendis's thing is all about the dialogue, and even more than that, about the asides within the dialogue... It requires someone who can handle subtlety and body language well, and Greg Land, um, isn't that guy. Much has been made about Land's use of the photo reference, but his bigger fault to me is that he really can't do anything other than melodramatic overacting - His characters never speak, they shout (especially his women, who more often than not, have their mouths wide open in full-on screaming mode), and that plays especially oddly when given Bendis dialogue. Characters don't quip anymore, they kind of yell lines while women stand in the background with mouths agape and chests pushed out. It makes for bizarrely uncomfortable reading, as if The West Wing was performed by pornstars or something. Awful.