From Dynamite, Project Superpowers #5 starts off with a powerful cover, courtesy of Francesco Mattina. It’s an Xray, or a skeleton, or something. But captivating and a nice graphic, all the more to attract the casual reader.
As a casual reader of the title myself, I delved into issue 5 and started to navigate its pages.
Writer Rob Williams, artist Sergio Davila and colourist Ulises Arreola bring us Imani’s earliest battle: Stand up to the neighbourhood bully. It’s Vincent Cromwell, the large, matchstick chewing tough guy. Standing up to Vincent is not an easy task.
Neither is standing up to the alien invader “P:Andora”, a superpowered evil giant.
It seems that the Earth’s armies are defeated, and only Imani and the “Spirit of the American Flag” are able to fight to protect us all. But there are helper heroes named Scarab, Black Terror and Masquerade. And a giant Samson. A lot of superpowers!
It’s the epic battle that we are accustomed to seeing in big-budget superhero movies: the heroes, wrapped (literally in this case) in the American flag, defending vaguely stated values. Big buildings are destroyed (potentially killing thousands of innocent citizens), tons of yelling and punching. Imani is front and centre for most of the action, which is commendable, but this issue is a bit too much of a whirlwind of conflict and battling heroes, each jumping in for their cameo.
Artwork by Davila is explosive enough, but the story is convoluted and requires a lot of energy for a casual reader to digest.
Dynamite, Project Superheroes #5, $3.99 for 22 pages of content. No rating
Newsdesk