The Ravagers #1

DC

Writer: Howard Mackie; Artist: Ian Churchill

May 30, 2012 DC New 52 By J. Nisen

The Ravagers #1 from DC Comics is one of the more disappointing books I’ve read since the “New 52” relaunch, even coming in with staggeringly low expectations. The Ravagers is marred by generic ideas and confusing visual storytelling, and only slightly counterbalanced by a nice panel here or there.

The characters: unimaginative. They even made the relaunched version of Beast Boy dull and grey by inserting a bland personality and taking away his trademark green color. (To me, he looks brown; some marketing copy at the back of the book tease fans that he’s now red, and references Animal Man and Swamp Thing as a tie-in for this color change. Why I couldn’t get this from the story instead of ancillary materials is part and parcel of the problem.) As the old axiom goes, “if it ain’t broke….” Or, to be more fair, if you’re gong to fix it, make it better, not blander. The visual designs of the characters are the perfect disharmony of too much detail and none of it interesting. The dialog is atrocious. The one slightly saving grace is the visual design of Fairchild (formerly a Wildstorm property, depicted in the book Gen 13), which is nice, although her transformation into essentially a Hulk clone, afraid of “losing control,” is another example of trite and tired melodrama.

I’m not going to bother with a recap beyond “super people escape from some secret facility and argue and agonize on a frozen tundra for most of an issue, then agonize while fighting equally generic enemies.” Oh, here’s some color: one of them is named “Ridge.”

I appreciate the pendulum swinging back away from “decompressed storytelling,” and creative teams trying to pack a lot into 20-odd pages, but this is sound and fury signifying immense disinterest. Just a mess. (www.dccomics.com)

Author rating: 2/10

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Average reader rating: 2,453/10

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