9/14/2023 0 Comments Radiant black 1It seems the team behind the book understands their failures all too well, because the book actually gains momentum - and lays out its larger Go! Go! Power Rangers trajectory - after it effectively kills off its wooden lead, presents actual sci-fi superpower stakes, and introduces a villain in its fifth issue. All of these concepts are presented almost in the background of the first four issues as the book tries to grind some life into its static, shallow cast and its larger, more personal lives. Over the course of the six issues collected in (Not So) Secret Origin, we are introduced to the Radiant suit, a second (red) suit with which Radiant Black has recurring conflicts, and an abstract dream-quest robo-monstrosity who provides cryptic but ultimately uninteresting portents of doom. not fun for a writer, let alone a reader. This certainly makes the third issue of the story its least effective, but it’s only a symptom of a much larger problem in Radiant Black: mismanagement of the story’s time. It’s part of the cultural DNA, a relic of the echo chamber that is writers writing for writers, and it’s as sappy and hackneyed a woe-is-me trope in comic book form as it is in any medium, but it reaches all new lows when an entire issue of a superhero book about cosmic flight suits avoids any actual super-powered conflict to focus, instead, on some poorly implemented brainstorming about a not-very-good short story our protagonist is failing to write. Look, every fiction writer in the world has a story in them about a writer who is concerned with how writing is hard, actually. This is after the book introduces us to the micro-black hole-powered super-suit that is implied to be the true story of the book, but which fails to alter the character’s life in any perceivable way. An incredible uphill struggle is made - by the character, by the reader, by the comic itself - with the character’s crippling inability to write. He’s moved home to his parents’ house in Illinois and struck back up a neglected friendship with Marshall, a movie buff who never left. Our main character is Nathan, a failed writer with a mopey, self-defeatist attitude and an impossible amount of debt. Listen to the latest episode of our weekly comics podcast!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |