EMPYRE #5

 

I suppose this sums up one of the big reasons I don’t particularly enjoy these big event books: Black Panther gets impaled by a sword in this issue and has no pulse and dies of blood loss…but he’s alive on the cover of #6. Jesus Christ. Also the sun is set to explode in nine minutes which would be the end of Earth. Woudn’t that be funny if I was completely wrong and the sun did explode and everyone on Earth died and Marvel could publish the books featuring the characters out in space like the Guardians of the Galaxy? And I guess they could publish Thor, since his home world is Midgard and not Earth…plus he’s like immortal. And I guess they could keep publishing The Immortal Hulk…since he wouldn’t die. So that’s 3 titles! Think this event will lead to Marvel only publishing 3 titles? You get the point I’m making…that the huge stakes in these event books are superfluous and things no reader takes serious…which takes the drama and suspense out of them. This issue also opens up with a gay wedding in Las Vegas…which feels totally out of place to just stop a world-ending, mega fight between various alien species and superheroes to show a wedding in Las Vegas. Maybe writer Al Ewing recently attended a gay wedding and decided to shoehorn it into this book to make the masses accept a gay marriage as being just an everyday thing and not something certain people find weird or revolting or wrong. Maybe Al Ewing is gay. Who knows? What we do know is that Al Ewing isn’t the greatest writer. I was hoping co-writer Dan Slott would write one of these issues but no, they’ve kept the same creative team throughout this series…which means they probably finished the whole thing before #1 was even printed. Which is a good thing, as I yearn for those halcyon days when a writer/artist team stayed on a book for a long run. I will say this about Al Ewing (and this is maybe why a lot of critics probably like his books): a lot of his stuff, besides the gay wedding of course, feels old-school like a Marvel space book from the ‘70’s. I mean…modern comics don’t usually feature super-dumb dialogue like this nugget: “I’m going to try to use the star-sword to disrupt the portal.” Also Hulkling turns out to be an evil impostor and the real Hulkling is in the brig locked in a Skrull inhibitor mask. Groan. And so we move to the conclusion of this awful saga with #6…which I presume will be out next week since I think the books have been coming out weekly. Maybe even Marvel realized the book sucks and so they just decided to release it quickly. Granted, it was supposed to be wrapped up a month ago but the pandemic changed things. I still like my reasoning better. 1/2*