WEIRDWORLD #1

Capsule Review

Weirdworld was an unexpected part of Marvel’s most recent Secret Wars, and the setting gets its shot as an ongoing here. It doesn’t quite work. Part of the problem is that the book is named after a setting. Would you pick up a book titled, “Manhattan?” Or, “Moon” or “Gotham?” (Ok, that last one, probably.) Your first experience with Weirdworld can’t help but be a little rootless, but it might be rescued by the right characters and conflict, and that is the case with this book … almost. We have a time-lost teen cast ashore in Weirdworld’s trackless weirdness, brought together with a broad-shouldered warrior woman who takes special delight in carving up wizards. S’okay, but too-easily disposable, and doesn’t sufficiently anchor us inside Weirdworld, which suffers for being a setting where seemingly anything can occur at all. On the one hand, this offers unlimited possibilities, but the downside is the reader has no clue what to expect, and it is all too easy to slip into Weirdworld as a generic trial, a series of one damn (weird) thing after another. (I didn’t much like Weirdworld as the setting for Black Knight’s book, either). Writer Sam Humphries gives me a reason to care about the main character with an end-of-issue reveal, and artist Mike Del Mundo’s painterly style is interesting to look at, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts. It is books like this that drive home how often we overlook the value of the mainstream Marvel Universe as a safety net for comics that might not quite work on their own. World-building is hard, and this bit of (Weird)world building falls short.

Approachability For New Readers

It’s weird (what would you expect?), but it works.

Read #2?

I don’t think so.

Sales Rank

#85 December

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