Bring on the Bad Guys: Abomination #1 // Review
Emil Blonsky is in Wakanda. He’s not exactly on vacation. He’s staying below the capital. 200 meters below the capital. So...y’know...he’s a prisoner. And he’s just been informed that his request for extradition back to his home nation of Croatia has been denied. So naturally he’s going to be upset. Considering the fact that his 6’8” tall and capable of bench pressing 100 tons, he’s not exactly a guy anyone would want to anger. This, however, is exactly what happens in Bring on the Bad Guys: Abomination #1. Writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson renders a fun, little action horror one-shot story with penciler Sergio Davila, inker Aure Jimenez and colorist Arif Prianto.
Mr. Blonsky IS, however, being offered a deal. Blonsky was a spy going way back before the big transformation, so he’s well aware of what this sort of thing might be. If Wakanda is willing to work with him on anything, it’s going to have to be pretty damned threatening. And so naturally he’s going to want to know more about it before he agrees. He know’s that he could be in over his head...which is really saying something when one considers Blonsky’s massive stature.
Johnson slams together a few fairly basic plot elements and lets the percussion speak for itself. There isn’t a great deal of depth to the story, but there is more than enough to serve as a central gravity around which all of the issue’s action orbits. The supernatural action that serves as the central conflict build around a very simple cloak and dagger story that feels solid enough to serve a few pages in the middle of summer. Blonsky has rarely lived-up to his potential as a character. Without too much depth, Johnson allows the Abomination to get a few steps closer to his potential.
There’s a big, green and scaly muscle monster at the center of the action. He’s the title character and so it makes a lot of sense that he would be the center of it all. The issue is that Davila is framing the action WAY too close to the Abomination to make the kind of impact it could. There’s so little around the edges of the action visually. As a result, it just looks like a lot of weird, organic texture sliding and slamming across the page. Abomination deserves better framing that uses the negative space of the page a bit more.
The Bring on the Bad Guys series continues. Overall, it IS an interesting look at monsters’ and villains’ paths intersecting across a shared plot, but it would need to bear a bit more of a serious intensity about it in order for it to feel like more than shlock horror. Still--it IS nice to see an issue that simply follows around a villain and allows that villain to be victorious. It feels like Johnson and company are getting away with something simply allowing the villain to be a villain.
