Shadowman #11 and #12 (New Valiant)

Valiant's 'current' Shadowman series is definitely the worst of its relaunch, in my opinion. Its stories are overlong, establish extremely little, and have boring, dull nothings of characters! Now that the first two arcs, as well as two pointless and rushed origin issues are out of the way, is their room for improvement for this series?...

Issue #11

It's Halloween night in New Orleans, and Jack Boniface, the current heir to the Shadowman lineage*, is just rambling around when he sees a few mischievous spirits flying about. They possess a few drunken knobs, and run around, wanting to have fun. Jack heads after them, hoping to catch and send the spirits before the night can get too chaotic...

*If you're wondering why I'm not elaborating on what that is, it's because the series sure as hell doesn't!

This is a slightly-goofy Halloween one-shot, basically, and it feels incredibly divorced from the rest of the series, given that main character Dox just died! We see neither the effects of his death, nor how it hit Jack and Alyssa. Jack never mentions Dox once this issue, and Alyssa never appears at all!

Jack Boniface is a dull character as usual, but here, he whines too! "Responsibility is a curse. If you screw up, people won't trust you. If you do a great job, then all they do is load you up with more". Oh boo hoo Jack. If you have nothing to say about being a superhero and protector of the innocent other than 'wah wah, I have to do work' then quit being a superhero! Darque is dead, therefore all reason for Jack even being the Shadowman is complete! His family can let the burden go now, and be at peace. Jack could easily just move to Cancun. Sure he may not be able to get rid of his powers, but all that means is that he'll be able to whip up some cool superpowers whenever he wants to!

Shan 'Dr. Mirage' Fong appears here, having previously shown up in Shadowman Issues #5 and #6. She's entertaining, but has no character to her. Also, as I said in my review of Shadowman Issues #5 to #9, there's no indication here that Shan has a husband, which is detrimental to her new miniseries.

This issue's 'villains' are pretty nothing. They just seem like fun-loving sprites, rather than anything dangerous, or even all that annoying. They are after all possessing the particular people they do because said guys are drunken jerks!

The art here is all decent, but the cover is rather boring. The layout of one scene is really badly done. It's a fight scene, and the panels radically swing from one thing to another. It's also confusing in one panel, where Jack kisses Shan against their will. I think the implication is that Jack was punched into Shan, but due to the poor scene structure (and the fact that she was facing a different direction!), it looks more like Jack is a sexual predator.

Jack Boniface's whining idiocy aside, this is a slightly entertaining harmless romp, and not bad by any means.

Issue #12

Issue #12 is another issue that's basically a one-shot. For no reason, it's a collection of Shadowman short stories.

~~~

Deadside Blues is a very good short story. It gets across character for Jack, and Jaunty is a likeable spiritual advisor. He actually acts like the Jaunty from the fantastic 1999 video game, which is much appreciated! He's also not wasted here either, which is even more appreciated! Unfortunately the next two arcs are gonna ruin that for us again. The artwork in this story is very good! Not a bad moment in it! Ultimately, this is the best story of this Shadowman series in the whole bunch!...

~~~

Lucky Charm is a crummy little story, focusing on a character who briefly appeared in one issue. The guy, Freddy, was someone reluctantly working for some Soma drug dealers, and he narrates about how sucky his life is, and how bad he feels about what he does for a living, but does it anyway, blah blah blah. This story is boring and pointless, and the ending is really confusing. It shows Freddy injecting a milk carton in his fridge with...something...for a reason (if its Soma, that would make sense if not for everything that comes after), then he goes to bed with his wife and baby, then the very next panel is him out in the streets being attacked by Shadowman. What?! And then the story has the balls to have a happy ending! This character is a total louse! He hardly deserves that!...Or is this ending of Shadowman showing mercy meant to be a Soma hallucination? If so, the issue does a terrible job at establishing it as such. It's so confusing that whether or not it's meant to be an ambiguous ending is entirely unclear!

One dumb part is when Freddy says that he strikes back against his drug dealers in subtle ways, like stealing pens from their supple closet! Wow, dude, you're really showing them!

The dumbest thing about this issue is its complete misunderstanding of what Soma is! It thinks that Soma is a drug taken from the brains of children, acting as distilled dreams, when in actual fact, Soma is one of two things-A muscle pain reliever also known as Carisoprodol, and a soothing religious drink that originated from India and the Middle East. Writer, do not take scientific advice from Where the Dead go to Die!

Finally, the artwork to this section is pretty meh.

~~~

This story has no name until the last panel, and there is zero transition between Lucky Charms, and this! That's confusing already, and once you get your bearings, you realize you're reading a very stupid story. Plot points are ridiculous, and the climax is confusing as hell! This whole story is just rushed!

This story does namedrop Dox a few times, but there's never any fallout from his death in Issue #9. It was just a thing that happened, and we never see how Alyssa feels about either it, or the fact that Jack was the one that had to kill Dox.

The artwork is ok, but it makes Jack look like a teen.

~~~

The final story in this collection is a brief two page black-and-white amateur-looking piece of crap. It's extremely rushed, confusing, and hard to read, given the subpar artwork, inking, and font!

~~~

The cover to this issue is pretty bad. It's boring, the title is partially obscured, and the way Jack's face is drawn is off, making him look like a monkey! Mouths are not that wide!

To finish, Issue #11 of Shadowman is a harmless 'one-shot', while Issue #12 is a mostly crap short story collection with one golden section...

Shadowman #0 and #10 (New Valiant)

In the middle of the last arc of Valiant horror-superhero series Shadowman (Issues #5 to #9), a #0 issue was released, to help elaborate on who the hell the villain was. It didn't help, as the evil necromancer Darque is such a nothing character that knowing the very start of his origin hardly elucidates on his character in that storyline, especially when we aren't seeing his turn to evil here at all!

A dark wizard living in the Antebellum South of America raises his two children, Nicodemo and Sandria, by teaching them the ways of magic. Due to his efforts, the man's children were born with special magical abilities far beyond that of any normal spellcaster, and this is all part of the man's plan to reach his way into a heavenly dimension known as Lyceum. Sandria and Nicodemo lead secluded but happy lives, until they realize the bloody cost that travel to Lyceum entails...

First things first, the summary of this issue on Comixology reads thusly...

"The end has always been near.

Twenty five years ago, Josiah Boniface was the Shadowman, and he had more problems than simply Master Darque: things from beyond are trying to eat the world, the police are trying to send him to jail and now he's got to rescue Helena LeBreton from a murderous cult, whether she likes it or not."

That is a complete and utter lie! What's worse is that the cover looks like it supports that plot, and that of an origin of the Shadowmen, as there are multiple ones from through the ages...but then you open it up and realize that this comic has fuck-all to do with Josiah Boniface, the Shadowman lineage, or even action of any sort!

This issue is actually about the origin of Darque and his sister. The story is pretty standard and boring. It doesn't do anything unique or special, nor do the characters have much to them. It's a Point A to Point B story that's over before you know it.

The artwork here is decent, but I don't much care for the scratchy style, and the gore in a few places looks off. In the above picture, it looks like someone blew up the picture in MS Paint and sprayed red colouring on Sandria, and there's a death scene at the end which shows a hilarious misunderstanding of the human body! The cover looks decent, but is a total lie! Also, the Shadowman in the middle looks like Iron Man.

Issue #10

In the Civil War, Sandria is helping the Union forces as she desperately hides away from her now mad brother. She falls in love with a soldier, Marius Boniface, and the two make the best of their lives, until Darque finally finds Sandria...

For Issue #10, the Shadowman creative team felt the need to again pull away from the main series in order to focus on the Darque family backstory, and thankfully, this time the story actually has something to do with the Shadowman lineage. This is a decently written story, but it suffers from the same problem as Issue #0-It focuses more on telling events to us, instead of letting them play out naturally. There's no real character here, and as for Sandria, just because she says she's something, it doesn't make her so. We the readers need to actually see it. This whole issue breaks the 'show, don't tell' rule really badly!

Sandria is a boring character. We have no insight into her character, despite her incessant inner-monologuing (she gets very little actual dialogue here, annoyingly enough). Marius Boniface is the same, as is Darque, except neither have their own narration, hence they have next to nothing to them. Speaking of, we don't see what made Darque evil at all. We see an unhelpful montage, while Sandria's narration says that he became an asshole (my words), it doesn't explain or show enough.

The Shadowman stuff in this issue is really rushed, as it's only introduced in the final couple of pages.

This issue's other big problem is that it takes all this time to introduce Sandria Darque, and how she was the one who created the Shadowman lineage, yet not only is she never seen again after this issue, we don't even know what happened to her after this issue! And yes, this does end up opening plot holes later down the track!

The fact that the Shadowman lineage was created by Sandria to stop her brother really bugs me. To me, an ancient lineage of Voodoo warriors, keeping the peace between the world of the living and the world of the dead is a lot more interesting than a family lineage that was only created 140 years ago, solely to stop one guy. Not only does it reduce the legacy and history aspect a lot, and localises their fight to merely this one bad guy, but this makes the Shadowmen seem really ineffectual, as they had one job, one job, and they somehow never succeeded! This also makes the last Shadowman storyline even worse, as Jack Boniface totally kills Darque at the end of it, despite dozens of generations being unable to do so, which isn't well-thought out writing to me.

There is one aspect to all this that I liked, which is that while Sandria assumed that her brother was vengefully hunting her down for escaping him, he actually never suspected that she had done so, as he loved her so much, and thought she reciprocated fully, that he didn't even consider any other theories, but instantly and solely believed that Sandria had been kidnapped.

The artwork is mostly quite good, but there are low moments, such as the montage with Darque-Poor gradient background work, and more MS Paint blood! The cover is ok, but a bit bland.

These two mediocre issues are barely Shadowman, and one presents a forced and rushed origin for the series that is hardly well thought out...

Shadowman #5, #6, #7, #8, and #9 (New Valiant)

Did I say that New Valiant's Shadowman series was decent in my review of Issues #2, #3, #4 of its run? Yeah, I'd like to retract that statement. Parts of this series, and/or single issues on their own are decent, but as a whole, this series is terrible! Is it really so hard to write a good voodoo horror series?...

Jack Boniface has recently been forcibly entrusted the legacy of the Shadowman Loa, and he has no time to train with his new abilities when the evil necromancer Master Darque begins to break the veil between the world of the living, and that afterlife of Deadside. Darque has turned Deadside into a nightmare, and as reality fractures and his malevolent troops invade Liveside, Jack Boniface-Shadowman-must team up with Baron Samedi, Lord of the Dead, to stop the apocalyptic threat...

Comics have followed the four-issue storyline pattern for a few years now, and it's really annoying! Because of it, you'll read the first five issues of a series, over the five months they're released, and since this is only the first storyline, only the bare minimum has been established! The effect this has on New Valiant's Shadowman is that over the course of nine, friggin nine, issues, we barely know the main character, his motivations, or his powers. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, given how little we know about the Abettors, the Brethren, Master Darque, or Deadside! We don't even know anything about Voodoo, or what a Shadowman is! Nine issues in and we still don't know what a Shadowman is!

Jack Boniface is a dull character! He always was, in the original series, and he's a goddamn dullard here too! Where's Michael LeRoi when you need him?! I'd take Doctor Facilier at this point!

The storyline's villain Darque talks like a pretentious hipster, and while the plan he's enacted has some neat horror behind it, nothing he actually does is scary, or makes him an entertaining villain. We don't know who he is, or what his powers even are! It's so bad that a #0 issue was released in-between Issues #6 and #7, which only barely elaborates on Darque's origin, as it just shows him as a kid.

Baron Samedi is the best character this arc. He's nothing special, but he's likeable, and ooky. He's supposedly 'not to be trusted' and 'bad news', but nothing here indicates that he's a psycho evil lord of evil or anything. He doesn't seem like Funshine Bear, but neither does he seem like Darque in the slightest. Naturally, this doesn't exactly endear those characters to you when there's still nothing to them either. Alyssa's character is that she's a chick with magical powers, and Dox's character is 'wizened old mentor who dies in the second act'. Yeah, he dies. It's so predictable and cliche that I'm surprised he didn't die sooner! That's not the only reason why I don't care that I'm spoiling his death though. The main reason I am is that his death affects nothing! He's not even mentioned in the next three issues! And of course, he had so little character in life that when he died, I felt no sudden void.

One character who really gets screwed over is Anne Alafair. She's a waitress who has the hots for Jack, and she exists solely to get killed. The problem is that she dies really abruptly! You read her talking with Jack, turn the page, and she's instantly dead. I was expecting at least some buildup! Her death is completely pointless, as we know nothing about this character, and she only had one other scene in this series, four issues ago. She doesn't even get any dialogue as she dies! Her death doesn't teach Jack a lesson about superheroics, or affect his character in any way, nor does her death serve to show just how big a threat the Brethren are-We already knew that when they were summoning demons from beyond the veil to ravage the world! The only thing to come of this is Jack being regretful for a couple of pages, before the series gets sidetracked and literally never mentions Alafair ever again! Her ghost does briefly shown up to say one line near the end of Issue #6, but after that, she vanishes!

Shan Fong, New Valiant's version of Dr. Mirage, is interesting ,but extremely underutilized, as she too just vanishes from the story. Also, between her appearances in this storyline, and in Shadowman Issue #12, there's zero indication that she has a husband, so the fact that her own miniseries (that started last month) starts with him already dead is bad writing!...But I'm getting off topic. That's an entirely different review for later...

Deadside dude Jaunty is wasted here, mostly just reacting to things (although he does get the best scene of the series, at the end of Issue #7). The Jaunty in the N64 Shadow Man game was a hilarious Irish snake guy who always had something amusing to say, while this Jaunty is just some non-Irish monkey who does not stop saying 'hoss'!

Darque's troops look cool, and their design looks like something from the disturbing Shadow Man video game, which would be really good if not for the fact that nothing else in this version of Shadowman bears any similarity to the game.

The artwork in this story arc is very inconsistent. It's mostly very good, but sometimes the quality really drops, especially in Issue #9. Jaunty fares the worst, as at first, he looks radically different to how he did last storyline. The covers are all really good, save for #9's, which is bland (and the red eye makes Darque look more like the Terminator than an evil necromancer). Also, #7's has a few problems-Jack's pose is weird, like he's about to break into song and dance than fight the hordes of evil, and the mere presence of Shan Fong is annoying when she's not in the comic! She's front and centre on the cover, bigger than the series' main character, and she's not even in the comic! Wow, that's some dumb non-sequitur-ing!

Pop quiz-Name one good Shadowman comic. BBBZZZZZZ! Wrong, the N64 game is not a comic...But you picked the only option even remotely applicable, so you still win. Congratulations. Now go forth and enjoy some other horror or voodoo related things, and forever ignore this lacklustre piece of crap!...

Shadowman #2, #3, #4 (New Valiant)

Shadow Man is one of my favourite video games ever made, yet the rest of the franchise is borderline cursed! The original series was dull garbage, while the Acclaim version was immature, dull, and terribly drawn, the second Acclaim version was merely good, and the present day version, while starting off ok, veered waaay off the rails with the End Times miniseries a few months back!

Jack Boniface is the latest in the Shadowman lineage. Gifted Voodoo powers by a Loa to fight evil, an inexperienced Jack is thrust into an unfamiliar and highly dangerous world as he has to stop a gestalt demon known as Mr. Twist from opening a portal to summon his master Darque from beyond the veil and into our own world...

The story to this four-part opening arc is pretty negligible. The whole plot is basically 'a bad guy wants to come through a portal', and nothing more. No elaboration on who the characters are, or on magic, or what the world of the supernatural is like. There are definitely good scenes in these issues, but the whole isn't as good as its parts. As for Jack Boniface, he's not dull, or unlikeable, but there's not much to him at all, which is the biggest problem to this arc, and ultimately the biggest problem of the series.

The writing is mostly decent, but one moment is terribly cliched! At the start of Issue #2, when Dox and Alyssa come to Jack's aid, one of Twist's henchmen says "You kill the Shadowman, I'll take these two.". Oh, that easy huh? Do you 'guys' normally regularly battle Shadowmen? It's not like they're the most powerful warriors in Voodoo-oh wait....

A scene I didn't like all that much is when the character Dox is explaining magic to Jack. It seems like the writer was nervous about the idea of having real magic in the same universe as sci-fi series such as XO Man-O-War or Harbinger, and therefore attempted a half-assed 'magic is merely a higher form of science' excuse. This is a bit annoying, as when your series' magic has a literal pantheon of gods, as well as an afterlife behind it, you can no longer use the 'this magic is simply a higher form of science' excuse. Now, this is only a bit annoying as this is dialogue from a character trying to explain magic in layman's terms to someone, so it could be that Dox is just equating magic to something Jack will understand and believe easier. It's better to think that, as the alternative paints Dox as a dumbass who knows nothing about the very thing he's devoted his entire life to.

This latest version of Shadowman has nothing in common with the video game, which is infuriating! I'm not asking for a remake to be exactly like the previous 'incarnation', but I wish it would at least utilize some of its aspects, given how great that version was! And no, the use of character Jaunty doesn't count, as this pushover monkey is not Jaunty!

This series' afterlife, Deadside, is pretty interesting, but extremely underused, which is a criminal shame! Speaking of underutilized, that's also the case with the city of New Orleans here.

Onto the characters, Shadowman protectors Dox and Alyssa are likeable, even if there isn't much to them. Mr. Twist is an ok villain, with some decent dialogue. As I said in my Shadowman Issue #1 review, I would call out his wearing of a tuxedo as being stupid and silly...but the Shadowman game is hardly bereft of its own silliness (such as Jaunty, or Marco Cruz), so I can easily swallow this.

This series has the best version of evil necromancer Master Darque thus far, but that's not saying much. The Darque of the original series was dull and boring, whereas the one from the Acclaim universe was an annoying punk. This latest iteration of the character is tolerable in Shadowman's second storyline, but here, he's dull, appearing only to issue a few commands to Mr. Twist, and be annoyed at the end.

Jaunty is tolerable here (except for his constant use of the word 'hoss'), and not as annoyingly wasted as he later becomes. His use later on is insulting to the original Jaunty, but as of this arc, your only question will be why he's now a monkey with a top hat instead of a snake in one.

The artwork here is very good. The covers are pretty meh though. They're cluttered, random, and all favour blank gradient orange backgrounds, which hardly scream horror! There's an annoying panel layout problem at the end of Issue #2, with the faces all over the place during a conversation.

This is a pretty disappointing opening arc to New Valiant's Shadowman series. It establishes little, and we barely know why we should care about anything here...

Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom #5, #6, #7, #8 (Dark Horse Comics)

Only one more post, and I'll have finished talking about Dark Horse Comics' disastrous Gold Key remake line! Today, I'll be looking at the final four issues of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom.

Nuclear scientist Doctor Phillip Solar received amazing superpowers when he was caught in a black-hole reactor meltdown. Unfortunately, Tanek Nuro, the CEO of company Lovejoy, and the man responsible for sabotaging the reactor, is angry that Solar has been empowered, as he intended to use the accident to give himself energy abilities. He manages to find a way to recreate Solar's superpowers for himself, and after using his powers to make several people into super-metallic power beings, Nuro sends them after his enemy. Meanwhile, Gail, Solar's love interest and coworker, is also in danger, and Solar has to save her as well as deal with Nuro...

Solar Rise

Solar Rise is a four-part backup story spread out over these issues, and the quality of writing is much better than the rest of the series! That's not saying much, but it's still nice.

There are a few problems with this story, such as poor transitions between the chaos inside the reactor, the rest of the plant, and the flashbacks at the plant. The villain Nuro's plan is also too vague! If it was explained more, then I wouldn't find him to be so ineffectual!

There's a pretty sizable continuity error in regards to Gail. It doesn't make sense that she starts working at Atom Valley the very day before the accident. Previous issues make it clear that she's worked there for a while. Either that, or Phil is head over heels in love (as in, 'stronger than death' love) with someone he's known for four hours, and is an obsessive psychopath! It's the former though. The writing in this series sucks.

The final problem with this story's writing is that there's a character who's railing against Solar's reactor, and he's 'subtly' named Dr. Dingus! I am not joking!

The artwork here (different from the rest of the series) is quite good, and certainly better than the art in the regular story...but there is one big screwup-Doctor Solar before the accident is meant to be fat, yet is drawn slim! Also, he constantly suffers from Youngblood's Disease.

Revelation Part 1: That Day of Wrath

Notable this issue are two really dumb moments! The first is when Nuro watches the recording of Solar getting his powers, and doing so actually affects the past! "I suspect that your virtual presence in this emulation threw off his calculations." says Nuro's assistant Choudhury. This was stupid in She-Hulk, and it's stupid here! In that comic, She Hulk was watching a memory, and here, the evil scientists are watching a recording! That's it! This should not be affecting anything!

The other scene is the dumbest thing I've read in a long while! Nuro sends a reanimated corpse to Solar with a sealed-up black hole, ready to let it loose once it approaches its target. The black hole is freed, and Solar acts quickly, tossing the thing into space before it can destroy everything. In his own words, the situation is now resolved because "There's nothing for it to accrete in space". WHAT?! WHAT?! BLACK HOLES ARE ALWAYS IN SPACE! And if there's one right next to Earth, Earth is doomed! Issue, you fail at science! Speaking of, what moron uses a black hole suicide bomber? It'd grow and pull in all of the planet, rendering their whole plan of taking it over rather useless!

Revelation Part 2: That Dreadful Day/That Fateful Day

Yeah, the copyright page and the comic itself couldn't get the damn title of this issue straight! Mark of quality!

This continues the storyline, with not much happening at all. I mean, there is a nuclear ninja, but it's nowhere near as awesome as it sounds.

A stupid and pointless dialogue exchange this issue is when Nuro asks Choudhury who Solar cares about, so they can take a hostage. Choudhury suggests a few names, eventually settling on Gail's, and he asks if he should arrange her kidnapping...Then Nuro says that he's already arranged for someone to kidnap Gail. Then why did you ask him for suggestions if you'd already knew who to take, and already sent out someone TO take her?!

Revelation Part 3: Heaven and Earth/...When Heaven and Earth

Yes, there was a title discrepancy between the issue, and its copyright page again with this series! The title is stupid anyway, as it's nonsensical with the 'When' and ellipses. When Heaven and Earth what? What was the first part of the sentence? What the hell?

This issue is basically a fight scene. The first page, with Solar trying to get Gail to call the police and failing is amusing, but aside from that, there's not much to enjoy here.

One especially poorly written part here is when Nuro, wanting to fight Solar, has the plan of setting this brawl in a place full of innocents...in a jail! Um, dude, I'm *pretty sure* that Solar won't give two shits about dangerously cutting loose with his powers in a place full of rapists and murderers! And bafflingly enough though, the ensuring fight scene at this location is completely abandoned. Huh?!

Solar is a dumbass this issue. For one, he debates the ethics of hitting a woman who's trying to kill him with superpowers! Shut up and sock her, you dickweed! Priority calls! Especially stupid is that Solar doesn't want to kill these empowered people as 1, he doesn't want to kill people, and 2, he assumes that they were unwillingly empowered (for literally no reason), yet once the fight's over, Solar restores the gravity around the trio to normal, sending them plummeting into the Earth thanks to their super dense cellular structure! Solar, dude, nevermind the fact that you totally just killed those three-What about the damage to the Earth you just caused?! Now, he does bring them back up onto the surface and restore them to normal once the fight is over, but they must have been crashing through the Earth at an insane speed for several minutes, making a hole deeper than the one in Doctor Who episode Inferno! Also, in the previous fight, one of the superpowered people had their arms blown off, and after returning the trio to normal, Solar mentions that he hopes the armless guy is taken to the hospital and treated for his wounds, despite the fact that he's clearly drawn with both arms back in his human form!

Revelation Part 4: ...All Fall Away

Oooh, so that's what the title of Issue #3 connects to!...Yeah, it's still stupid.I rarely like it when two-part stories have the one title separated over issues by ellipses.

This is an extremely poor concluding issue to this storyline. It's anticlimactic, the story thus far has only amounted to 'Nuro wants Solar Dead', and the other problem...I'll get into that later!

Overall

This isn't a very well-written storyline at all! It's got a crappy villain, flimsy story, multiple boring action scenes (made boring mainly due to the writing behind them), and an unforgivable conclusion! There's an annoying amount of poor expository dialogue. Some dialogue is just plain confusing! The worst crime of these issues is the extremely shaky science used! In one scene, it even has the balls to dismiss particular legit fields of science as being 'incorrect'.

Solar continues to be a boring hero. We know nothing about him (figuratively, I mean), or why he'd even want to be a superhero. His childhood backstory in the Solar Rise backup story is interesting, but it hardly fleshes out his character.

One thing about this series that's awkward as hell is that the title character's normal name is Solar! With the original Gold Key comics, it's fine, as Solar was never his superhero name, nor were his powers derived from the sun, so there was no confusion to be had. Yet thanks to Jim Shooter's efforts in the 90's, the character's superhero name was changed to Solar. 70 issues later, reverting back to having Solar be the character's real name is just confusing!

The fact that everyone in this series calls Solar 'Red Suit' (constantly!) makes me wonder if Jim Shooter has even read the Gold Key comics! What was Solar's superhero name in that series if not Solar? The Man of the Atom! Y'know, the part of the title that Jim Shooter has ignored for twenty years! You'd think Shooter would know better! Or does he genuinely believe Red Suit, and The Red Suit Guy are snappier titles than The Man of the Atom!

Gail isn't very developed at all, and the fact that she's a quantum scientist, and therefore incredibly smart, plays into nothing. As for her getting together with Phil at the end of the storyline, it's rushed!

Nuro is a crap villain. He's not intimidating, not well-characterised, and while part of the way he gets his powers is interesting, its nonsensically written! By wearing VR glasses showing a recording of a guy getting superpowers in a black hole, this gives Nuro superpowers!

This issue commits a horrible crime regarding its main villain. You know what happens? Nuro's long-suffering assistant Choudhury gets angry and tries attacking Nuro...and is easily vaporised by the series' main villain. Nah, I'm just kidding. Choudhury totally kills Nuro! Nuro is meant to be the big bad of this series, and he's killed in one panel by a glass coffee pot to the head by his assistant! I am not joking! Maybe at this point Jim Shooter knew there'd be no more issues, and decided to end the storyline in the stupidest possible way!

As for Shooter's everpresent misogyny, there's only one possible example of it here, with a scene of a woman's hanging bloodied, naked (albeit censored by shading) corpse. If the writer here was anyone else, I probably wouldn't have a problem with this scene, but given Shooter's track record, I doubt this is a coincidence!

The artwork here is crummy. It's not terrible for the most part, but not all that good either, with sketchy, poorly shaded characters. It's almost Frank Miller-lite in some places, both Choudhury's skin tone and hair colour keep changing from scene to scene, and Solar looks Liefeldian with his muscular structure at some points! The covers, however, are great, even if they are total non-sequiturs.

One final thing of note is these issues' obsession with the word 'accrete'. This whole series won't stop using this word!

In closing, Jim Shooter can't write. He is an editor, not a friggin' writer! This has become blatantly clear to me, and aside from his four issue Mighty Samson run (the final Dark Key series), I only have a scant few issues of Valiant's Solar series, and the Unity crossover to review, and then I don't have any intention to read another thing by this guy any time soon! Thank Heaven for small favours though, such as the fact that Shooter has been booted out of so many comic companies, from Marvel, to Dark Horse (well, that was a failure more than a firing), and Valiant, which is especially hilarious, since he co-founded Valiant! Dude just can't catch a break! Who knew Secret Wars II would be the high point of Jim Shooter's career!...

Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom #1, #2, #3, #4 (Dark Horse Comics)

Y'know, one day I'm going to read the original Gold Key version of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna enjoy it. I'll sure as hell prefer it over its dreadful remakes, courtesy of Valiant Comics, and Dark Horse, both versions written by industry stalwart Jim Shooter!...

Dr. Philip Solar is a nuclear scientist who has been involved in a reactor accident. He survives the event, being reborn with amazing new powers. However, in the brief period that he was outside of reality after the accident, he instinctively corrected a faux-pas he made at a date with acolleague Dr. Gail Sanders, and in doing so causes anomalies to be spread through space and time, One such anomaly is Whotmore Pickerel. He's a crummy sci-fi author who suddenly has the power to bring anything he thinks of to life, basically like tulpas (Tibetan mythology). He brings Leviathan and Glow, two of his sci-fi characters to life, and when he forcibly kicks them out, he accidentally creates an evil god Moloch, who wants to destroy the world. Moloch forces Pickerel to create Sunya, another god, and then a large stone army. Solar now has to stop the problem and save the day, if he can...

Troublemaker Part 1:  Lust and Leviathan

Ugh! This issue starts off after Philip Solar has gone through his lab accident and gained superhuman powers! I wonder if Jim Shooter knows how to write an origin story at the start of a series, rather than eight months later! The Valiant Solar series had this same problem!

Given that this starts off in media res, there's a poor exposition dump at the start of the issue, where Solar's friend Dr. Clarkson, who already knows the story of Solar's rebirth, wants to hear it again, because the audience needs to. How about this, Jim. Why don't you have this time be the first time?!

One dumb part about Solar's explanation about his rebirth is that he says that since his clothes were destroyed in the reactor accident, he created new ones, in the form of a red spandex jumpsuit for some reason. And the dumb part is that he created headgear and a symbol for this outfit because they "seemed appropriate somehow". WHY?!

There are a couple of other minor problems, such as a crappy scene transitions, and one part when Leviathan yells at Solar in their fight scene "Because you ain't got no couth!". This line comes out of nowhere, as Solar didn't say anything to warrant such a response.

This is a terrible first issue! It tells us almost nothing about its main character, how he came to be a superhero, or why he's a superhero!

Troublemaker Part 2: Out of the Frying Pan

This issue starts off abruptly as hell! At the end of last issue, Solar was spying on Whitmore Pickerel's house, where Leviathan and Glow were...and his issue starts off with Solar and Leviathan already in a fight again! The radical art shift does not help things!

Troublemaker Part 3: Into the Inferno

A lot of this issue's problems run deep! More on that later. For now-This is a meh issue.

One annoying scene is when Phil is spying on Gail, and he's dismayed that the colleague she's dating is a 'skirt-chaser'. And you're so much better, Phil? You're a dirty old man who's caused catastrophic and possibly world-ending anomalies to the universe simply because you wanted to erase an embarrassing date with Gail from history! And you're currently spying on her!

Troublemaker Part 4: Though Hellspawn Should Bar the Way

Well that's a mouthful of a title! In fact, Troublemaker is putting things lightly when Pickerel's powers have cause brutal rape and mass destruction! 'Troublemaker' indeed!

This is a pretty bland finale to this storyline, but it features the best use of Leviathan and Glow so far, which slightly makes up for the waste of everything else.

Overall

The plot of this opening storyline of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom is rubbish! While not unbearable for the most part, and largely not even particularly terrible, it's not enjoyable at all! It's not very well written, with an overlong lacklustre story that doesn't even get resolved! Yeah, the evil god villains are taken care of, but what about Whitmore Pickerel's power? He still has that, and Moloch was created out of a dream, rather than a conscious choice! Also, Pickerel could've easily vaporised Moloch at any point! The fact that there's no intro to this series is even worse. Like I said above, it starts off as if we're reading Issue #4 or something!

Onto the characters, or lack thereof. We know next to nothing about Philip Solar, and his powers are only vaguely explained. Like Shooter's Valiant Solar, there's an everpresent real-time narration from Solar, and most of what he's talking to himself about is his concerns for Gail's dating life while he's fighting evil gods of death! And this isn't a one-time thing. He narrates constantly about his 'love' of Gail in just about every fight scene, despite being, you know, busy! Hell, the guy even abandons Leviathan and Glow to deal with the stone army and the two evil gods, on their own, just so he can go visit Gail, as he's late to his dinner with her. *clap clap clap*

While the Solar of Valiant Comics is a truly vile and reprehensible character (unintentionally), this incarnation of the character is just a dick. He causes constant property damage in superhero fights in extremely petty ways, such as when he lasers off a whole section of pavement that Leviathan is sitting on, or when he takes Leviathan to a trainyard and completely rips the tracks apart, nails and all to use as a restraint for the guy! That would be horrible even if there wasn't a train present, but there is! Whether or not it's mobile is up in the air, but I'll assume it is!

The reason Solar here is even wearing a costume is negligible. The writing attempts to explain it, but its really weak. The biggest problem with this Doctor Solar is that he's so non-proactive! He's searching for an evil god that can destroy the world, and he looks for it at Pickerel's house. Pickerel denies knowledge of having created Moloch, and Solar knows he's lying, yet never bothers to go back to see if Moloch went there. And you know what he does next? Relaxes calmly around his house for nearly two days, with not a care in the world! This is a hero who's so bored that he fails to prevent a character from getting brutally raped multiple times! Jim Shooter can't write a heroic character to save his life, can he! Also, does he secretly hate the original Gold Key Doctor Solar stories? Because his versions of the character do not come across as remakes made by a longtime fan of the source material.

Where Solar sucks, Leviathan and Glow are awesome! They're well-written, likeable, and interesting characters. I wish the series was about them instead of Solar!
Glow is a character I'm sure the seemingly misogynistic Jim Shooter was only too happy to write! The only female main character (hell, nearly the only female character) is a scantily-clad nymphomaniac. There'd be nothing wrong with that if she wasn't only acting like that because the writer wants to get his rocks off.

The Susan tulpa Pickerel creates is even worse! While the reason behind Glow's creation seems sexist on Shooter's part, her character at least stands out beyond that intent, whereas Susan is a tulpa that Pickerel creates to love him, make him dinner, and do all of his housework! I'd assume this was done to portray him as a bastard, but I don't trust Shooter as far as I can throw him! The concept behind Susan is probably his own fantasy. He wishes!...

Moloch is a decent villain for this story, but is used pretty poorly, and he has no character to him.

Tanek Nuro, a villain from the '60's Doctor Solar, appears in Issue #1 briefly, later appearing in #4. He's ridiculously villainous here, as he literally uses poor people as punching bags in his office! This could fit in a comedy or satire, but in a serious comic?! He's not very well written either, as his actions in #4 would insure his company would tank very quickly even without the bad press it'd cause!

Dr. Clarkson is an ok character, but underused. Same with Gail. Solar constantly rattles on about his affections for Gail, and how it's even caused these troubling anomalies in the world, yet, he barely has two scenes with her over four issues!

The artwork here is lousy! Thankfully the crappy art of Issue #1 is ditched in the following issues, thanks to the Dark Key line's huge schedule slip. Unfortunately this artwork isn't much better, and is worse in some places. There's one really lazy moment where the same panel is re-used twice! In Issue #2, Glow and Leviathan are running away from Pickerel's house, and in Issue #3, Susan does the same, and nothing about the two panels (aside from the light-filtered sun) is different aside from the silhouettes!

The covers are pretty decent. They have a nice painted photorealistic look to them.

The only thing aside from Leviathan and Glow that I like about these comics is one line Solar gets when fighting Surya-"I'm beginning to hate mythological gods. And Pickerel."Not hilarious, but it made me chuckle.

To finish, these four issues of Dark Horse's Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom are bad! They're rotten! Oh, and if you're wondering, the Dark Key schedule delays insured that these four issues were released over about six months. That's surprisingly efficient for the Dark Key line, given it took Turok, Son of Stone a year to get its four issue run out!...

Solar, Man of the Atom: Alpha and Omega (Classic Valiant)

In 1991, 1960's Gold Key comic series Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom was remade (along with other GK property Magnus, Robot Fighter) by Jim Shooter, co-founder of Valiant Comics. Shooter was apparently a big fan of Solar as a kid, and I have a bone to pick in that regard. You'd think if he was such a fan, he'd know that Solar was never the character's superhero name! It was his actual name, and never used as a superhero moniker, nor was it ever meant to. He was The Man of the Atom.

Alpha and Omega is the origin story of Valiant's iteration of the Solar character, and it was stupidly spread out over the first ten issues of the series as six-page backup stories. After a long ten months, readers finally knew just who the hell they were reading about!

Dr. Phil Seleski is a nuclear physicist at the Edgewater nuclear plant in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Something goes terribly wrong one night with his new fusion reactor, and Seleski is able to shut it down, but at a seemingly terrible cost-His body is charred beyond belief, and radiation is flooding the city. However, the radiation suddenly all disappears, and Seleski shows clear life signs despite being a withered husk, burnt at the core of a nuclear meltdown. Seleski soon heals, and realizes that the accident has given him incredibly powerful abilities to control and absorb radiation, move matter, and much more. At first, his colleagues at Edgewater-including his boss Dr. Dobson, and the bitter Dr. Erica Pierce-run tests, trying to determine the cause of Seleski's new powers. Growing increasingly annoyed at the constant tests, Seleski seeks companionship with his colleague and crush Dr. Gayle Nordheim. Things begin to go horribly wrong when Seleski, angry at the numerous faults in nuclear plants over the world, sets about fixing them. The governments of the world are appalled by Seleski's inconceivable powers and hostile attitude, and set about destroying him before he can do any more damage...

Solar Man of the Atom: Alpha and Omega isn't bad, technically, but it's boring, tedious, and there are more than a few aspects that piss me off about it, like the fact that it has nothing to do with Solar, Man of the Atom! This story squanders its 79 page limit in many ways, such as it's overabundance of splash pages, and having many, many pages have only two to four panels. The characters are cutouts who never really advance naturally. Drastic changes do happen, mainly to Phil Seleski, but character development just isn't here. There's even some unfunny comedy at one point, which is really out of place! This story is just too long, and it meanders to get to the point. When it gets around to having Phil Seleski start considering himself a god, it's really abrupt, as he seemed pretty grounded up until that point.

Another big problem is that Phil Seleski is constantly narrating! I don't narrate my life as it happens, especially not when I'm in dire situations such as a nuclear meltdown! Now, real-time internal narration in comics is something that can work, so long as the comic in question is A, good, and B, doesn't overuse the device, but Solar, Man of the Atom, and in fact the majority of Valiant comics, overuse it like crazy. Numerous Valiant heroes narrate interminable walls of text, yet we know nothing about their character, whereas other Valiant series' The Second Life of Doctor Mirage, and The H.A.R.D. Corps have zero narration, instead relying on actual dialogue to get across characterisation (and succeeding beautifully).

As this was a serialized story, there are numerous poor transitions between sections when you're reading it all in one go. This could have been bearable if they had chapter heading, but it'd still be abrupt and a nuisance.

There's one particularly stupid scene in Alpha and Omega, when Seleski first performs superheroics. He runs into a burning house to save a family, all the while constantly narrating to himself. First of all, he mentions how he can't see where he's going through the inferno, even though he doesn't see through eyes anymore, as he's pure energy. And even if the fire is simply encompassing all the space in the rooms, he can view reality at different frequencies. Another dumb line is when he first runs into the flaming house, and he says "I'm fireproof...I think". He thinks! This scene's biggest flaw is that there's no reason given why Seleski didn't just put the fire out. He could totally do it!

Phil Seleski is a boring main character. He has one note-'I am now God!'-and that's it.To top that all off, he's not even all that likeable. The romance between him and Gayle isn't very well written. It's sudden, out of nowhere, and it makes a lot more sense for Phil to end up with Erica rather than Gayle, as she's just a colleague, whereas he and Erica are both lonely souls, who interact a lot more.

Gayle is a pretty meh character. She's likeable-ish, but she has the personality of a plank of wood. Edgewater manager Dr. Dobson is almost more than a one-dimensional cowardly bureaucrat, but the writing doesn't quite pull through enough. Thankfully there's at least effort to give his character depth.

Erica Pierce is a problematic character, and that's tied either to Jim Shooter's poor writing in this series, or his apparent sexism/misogyny. To start with, the reason she starts hating her soon-to-be mortal enemy Phil Seleski is just because he doesn't want to sleep with her. I am not kidding! The other big problem with her character is that she is both one of the more sympathetic characters in the Valiant universe, and the greatest hero (Yeah, from all I've read from Valiant comics, I fully support Pierce's 'evil' plan in the Unity crossover), yet is constantly treated as a villain, and scorned.

Oh, and Jim, Gayle is a scientist, not a secretary-You call her Doctor! This was a bearable problem in the Gold Key series, because that was written in the '60's, when sexism was annoyingly prevalent, but in the '90's, it's inexcusable for the male characters to always call their female colleague by their first name instead of rank or surname despite Gayle referring to them with the latter options. Maybe I'm looking into things a bit too much, but Jim Shooter really pisses me off! I've read too many of his comics for the sexism and/or misogyny of these to be merely unfortunate and separate unintentionally denigrating happenstances.

The writing is really poor in regard to Erica, as her hatred for Phil Seleski is really out-of-nowhere. At one point, she's intrigued by him, and wishes to be shown 'the nature of all things' (an offer Gayle refused), but after that, things go awry with the writing. When they go back to the normal dimension, Erica is suddenly going on about how violated she feels because of Seleski, which doesn't make much sense for her to say, given what happened in 'unreality'. As a place of pure thought, it's 'no place for low confidence', so the self-loathing Erica has a bit of a hard time, given her own horrid life. I say a bit, because Seleski only has her in Unreality for about half a minute, and the cause of the troubles in Unreality are tied to Erica's abuse-filled home life-Seleski is pretty blameless in this situation.

The artwork here is ok. It's good in some places, and mediocre in others. Particularly bad is one line-"Got a scissors?". Got a scissors! Oops, much?! One particular thing of note is the so-called biggest comic panel ever. In each of the first ten issues of Solar, there's a pullout splash page, and when they're all put together, they show the ending. This was a poor idea, in my opinion, as one, when all put together, this panel is way too big, and two, the placement is off, in my opinion-These pages are shoved right in the middle of things, and likely confused the hell out of readers for ten months (an introduction does say the pages are portraying the story's climax, but that's pretty vague information, especially as it was nearly a year before readers would find out what Alpha and Omega's ending even was). It would have been much better if these were just pages that were part of the book, and all came at the end, in order. Here's hoping the Alpha and Omega trade did that.

One final thing to talk about is continuity, and Acclaim Comics. In the Valiant universe, the Gold Key Solar comics are just that-Comics. They end up inspiring Phil Seleski to become a nuclear physicist, and as he subconsciously causes a disaster just like the one in the Solar comics to give him superpowers, he ends up destroying the universe, and when he recreates it, it's now teeming with comic book-y stuff thanks to the effect his imagination had on the recreation. Now there are evil aliens who have traversed the universe slaughtering entire galaxies, while Earth is apocalyptically screwed by evil mutants for a thousand years. After another thousand years of human suffering, Earth's future is finally ok, more or less...then evil alien robots come and kill billions. Flashforward to the Solar Acclaim comics, where it's explained that the Acclaim universe was created when Seleski went back in time to see the beginning of the universe. His mere presence drastically altered the universe, recreating it once more. All of this is the fruit borne by a single comic book series! Jesus, I bet the Paul S. Newman and Matt Murphy of the Valiant universe are wishing they never put pen to paper!

To finish, Alpha and Omega is a lacklustre origin story to Solar, Man of the Atom, and not worth your time.