Barbarella #5 // Review
One of the greatest heroes in the galaxy has knocked-out a. few of the villain’s power systems. She has fried the neural connective diodes holding it all together. The villain wouldn’t be the villains if he didn’t have a back-up plan as the hero is about to discover in Barbarella #5. Writer Blake Northcott concludes his story with artist Eric Blake and colorist Werner Sanchez. The series may have missed quite a lot of its potential as it rushed through all five issues with a bit too much ancillary plot, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been fun.
It’s all being done for the benefit of a movie. Lives are held in the balance and the only way out of it all is going to lie in Barbarella’s attack on the filmmaker. She may be a very powerful here, but he’s a formidable warrior himself. One does not get to be one of the greatest director/producers in the whole of the known universe without being able to defend himself. He might find that he has met his match, however, as she knows quite a bit about good storytelling that his script droids don’t. Things are about to get wild.
And it’s not nearly as cool as it sounds. Northcott had a real opportunity to pit superhero movies against superhero comics in a series that could have also touched on satire dealing with commerce and art and fandom and the very nature of storytelling and...well...a whole lot else besides. Instead, it’s all a bit cluttered in traditional pulpy space fantasy posturing and none of it feels like it’s really meeting with its true potential. As a pulpy space adventure, it ends up being fun in its own way, but it’s hard not to feel disappointed with the missed potential of the series.
Blake embraces the space fantasy adventure with the right angles and pacing, but the execution of the action is lacking. Fight scenes feel stiff. Romance and drama does appear to be framed in the right way, but it lacks the emotional resonance needed to really get it to engage on a deeper level with the reader. Blake delivers really good overly-detailed thumbnail sketches that could have been used to render far more accomplished art if he’d only managed to amp-up the action in a more coherent fashion. As it is, everything feels just a little bit stiff.
And then there’s the whole Mojo thing. Anne Nocenti and Chis Claremont had done stories involving an intergalactic villain who made dangerous movies involving superheroes in deathtraps and such and...those stories didn’t really live-up to the genius of Nocenti’s ideas either, which is really too bad. The basic idea really IS a lot of fun. Barbarella would be a fun character to send through murderous action films set-up by some crazy lunatic with a bottomless budget, but it would take a much more savvy script to be able to embrace the potential.
