REVIEW: End of Month Reviews #63 - March 2009 [spoilers]

[Andrew Perron]

On Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:16:00 +0000 (UTC), Saxon Brenton wrote:

*shakes moss off* Man.  May has been busy.

>      Now, the pertinent point of this is: I should have remembered Whatever.   
> After all, the discussion between herself and the Leviathan in issue 29,  
> which summarised the battles between the Legion and their Evilverse counter-
> parts (with its many fights, cooking contests, poker games, political debates,  
> and the intense non-efforts of Procrastination Boy and the Evilverse's Super-
> Apathy Lad vying to do nothing whatsoever) is one of my favourite and most  
> easily recalled scenes from the series so far.  However, upon further  
> reflection I realised that I could not recall much about Whatever beyond  
> her apprenticing herself to the Leviathan.  Clearly, I have not been  
> 'soaking' in this series, in the sense of re-reading it for pleasure in the  
> way I would for some others.  This, methinks, I will correct when I take a  
> few weeks rec leave in early May and reread the series.  At this point I  
> can't make a determination as to whether I've simply been insufficiently  
> fanboyish enough in not bothering to remember stuff once I had finished  
> summarising it, or whether the jumps over issues have harmed the narrative  
> flow, or whether certain characters get a greater proportion of the  
> characterisation than others.

I'd definitely say that some characters get more characterization than
others, and that Whatever was been pushed back to a subplot that, perhaps,
had been mentioned one time too few in the intervening issues.  Ah well.

>      However, there is always the risk that if too much of the plot is  
> subsumed by parody references that the story as a whole suffers.  To date  
> the overarching structure of _58.5_ has avoided that, simply because the  
> search for the Xinerama Brothers has matched the search for the Monitors  
> in _Infinite Crisis_ only loosely, allowing for various activities that  
> do not map one-to-one with the events of _Infinite Crisis_.  Meanwhile the  
> history of Earth 308 is not the main point of issue 47, but instead is  
> only the backdrop on which the LNHers are continuing their search.  By  
> comparison, if the main purpose of issue 47 had been about the struggle of  
> the New New New New New Young Teens against the Thundersquad, then I think  
> it would have required something more of a twist on the likes of 'Civil  
> War', 'Dark Reign' etc rather than being a distillation of them.

Personally, it was a bit too dense with refs for me, although the basic
plot was never obfuscated.

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, I'll pick up dandelions and I'll give
them to you~