Infinity Wars #1 Review

Writer: Gerry Duggan

Artist: Mike Deodato Jr

Colourist: Frank Martin

Letterer: Cory Petit

Finally… after the Countdown, after the Prime, we can finally read this damn story. I can’t say that I’ve been looking forward to this story, mostly since I didn’t really know what the story was about until the final few pages of this issue.

Overall I was bored with this, which is shocking considering that I like Gerry Duggan. My concerns are the pacing of the plot and the art. Things get really interesting and exciting during the last few pages, and that final page is something that people are going to be talking about for a while. Duggan gets the characters’ voices right and there are some humorous moments, but there are also moments that just fall flat in terms of humour which, again, surprised me given Duggan’s skill at humour.

The art is problematic as well. Mike Deodato has a certain style but it just doesn’t fit this big, cosmic story that should be bright and colourful. It’s muddy and murky. Deodato’s obsession with breaking up a page into as many panels as humanly possible is incredibly aggravating and makes no artistic sense to me. I’m not sure if it’s an attempt at page space economy but it’s constricting. Let the book breath!

The final few pages are what I wanted out of this issue, but the rest is filler and genuinely boring. The art doesn’t help either, as it’s muddy and not exciting to look at. If I were buying this I would have stopped right after that Prime issue, but the ending might interest some readers.