The New Gods #11 //. Review
Otis Tennant feels like he can speak the language of vultures.He has dreams of seeing death from distant places.He sees himself gliding over planets. In his mind he reaps dead dreams do that new ones may be born. Of course...he’s not there. Ihe’s having coffee in a truck stop near Van Horn, Texas. But he’s having dreams and visions of something much bigger than him. He’s having phantom memories of a life that goes way beyond the Earth in The New Gods #11. Writer Ram V continues to play homage to a pantheon of powerful being created by Jack Kirby. The story is brought to page and panel by artist Evan Cagle and colorist Francesco Segala.
Elsewhere, Akala, BIg Barda. and Wonder Woman are holding out the best that they can against Granny Goodness, Mad Hariet and her invaders. There’s no question that they’re a powerful defense, but Granny has an overwhelming amount of power on her side and it’s only a matter of time before Granny and her forces make it through. This is not to say that Barda doesn’t have a some plans that Granny doesn’t know about. Elsewhere still, Scott Free is confronted by DeSaad. Scott’s a remarkable escape artist. They don’t call him Mister Miracle for nothing...but DeSaad’s twisted mind might have found something even he can’t escape
Kirby’s New Gods have a great deal of potential that Ram V seems to be exploring in wide, simple strokes. It's such a sharp group of characters that it really doesn't take that much to present it in a way that fuels powerful and strangely idiosyncratic. There was a lot of poetry in what Ram V is bringing it to the page. The combination of different elements can be difficult for anyone to frame in a way that really respects the unique energies of everyone in the ensemble. Two of the authors credit, he's not trying to impose any undue stress or outside conflict on the characters that isn't already there in the way that Kirby originally conceived them.
Cagle and Segala considerable energies from the poetry of the script. That was a great deal of power that's present on the page. And the intensity of the combat feels suitably present. That being said, it's really difficult to show the intensity of the power of these characters in a way that really feels like it's resonating. Even Kirby's style didn't seem to capture it in quite the way he had written it. So it's very difficult to find the right visual elements to really bring across the intensity of the power that is inherent in these characters. Cagle does a pretty good job of making it all explode off the page with the right intensity.
It's fun seeing another creative team engage in a very self-contained group of characters that have been visited and revisited upon the page over and over again over the course of the decades since they were created. It's always nice to see a new and a fresh perspective on these characters. What's interesting about it is that it's very rarely in a case where a creative team will try to mutate the characters too far from where they had been created. Kirby had a really solid approach to creating this particular ensemble. And there are very few ways to do it that would be engaging it or exploring it in any kind of a new fashion. And the characters are interesting enough that it doesn't really seem to matter that their story has been told so many times without too much change.
