In Review Of: Powers #25 by Bendis and Oeming

Man, it seems like a long time since I've done a simple comic review.

See, heres the deal. I liked Powers, I really did. I recommended it to my friends and enjoyed the stories as being, really, my favorite Bendis work.

I'm getting a little tired of the reboots on the series. It’s starting to feel like the X-Files, and nobody wants that.

... and yet the current storyline is still working for me, in an odd little way. And I'm not sure why.

Oeming's art is something that I continue to enjoy, enough that I picked up a couple pages from him a year or two. Really nice stuff, bold in a non-derivative of Mignola way, which is something that many artists can't pull off. Mike's work, while it has certainly changed over the years, continues to be an interesting draw for me.

I almost dropped the book an issue or two ago when a promising storyline, with Queen Nior killing the other members of her team in ways that protagonist of the movie Seven would have approved, when the ending devolved into a simple wrap-up with a demon from hell. (And only in comics would that be considered a simple wrap-up, even a cop out really.) There was nothing clever about it, and it annoyed the hell out of me, because I really liked the build-up from the preceding issues. Nothing has a comic fan scorned like a simple ending, like having, I don't know, Elektra be a skrull or something.

Did I just say that out loud?

In any case, issue #25 promises all new story (which it starts, continuing the rest of the subplots from the earlier issues), a new format (with a different paper, which is really nice) and more pages, which is never a bad thing on a comic that you like. Especially when plenty of us are getting used to the longer reads in the trades, so extending your work beyond the usual 22 page fare is a good way to go.

End result? A nice issue and I'm staying with series for a while longer. I'm not quite sure about the two page sex scene, which comes off as terribly gratuitous, but the rest of it is solid and entertaining. I'll be waiting with patiently for the next, oh, say 6 months, til the next issue comes out.