Gwenpool #5 // Review
Gwen’s dead. Just a ghost of who she was. It's existentially frustrating. But it does actually help her out. Helps her out with her investigation. And if all luck holds out, she may actually be able to learn something about the situation. Things get really complicated for her in Gwenpool #5. Writer Cavan Scott continues a trippy, little adventure with one of the Marvel Universe’s most pleasantly convoluted heroes. The action comes tot he page courtesy of artist Stefano Nesi. Color comes to the page courtesy of Matt Milla. It's kind of a fun format to see Gwen move through her own title as it goes for a little bit. For the most part, however, there isn't a whole lot that's being presented that she feels very fresh.
The ghost Gwen has found herself in the presence of The Great Architect. There is another Gwen. She is presenting proof of various kills to the gentleman. His lack of enthusiasm for her kills is something that she finds to be more than a little bit rude. But then, he is the villain. He's going to do that, isn't he? He just wouldn’t be the arch-villain if he wasn’t at least a little humorless.
Umm...yeah. Scott isn’t doing anything here that hasn’t been one a million times. And in his own way, he’s at least acknowledging it, but I mean...THAT isn’t terribly original either. There's enough going on around the edges of the story to make it feel at least charming in its own way. But it doesn't really have a kind of gravitas that would really need to be able to develop into anything more than it is. Which is really too bad. Because there are so many different ways that this sort of thing could have been done a little bit better. All of the self-referential movements and meanderings around the center all of the strange metaphysics that are flowing across the panel. It could have been something. And it really seems like Scott is trying to make it something in the end, there's a panel second from the bottom just a few pages before the end that feels just about right. It’s a punch. And it feels good.
Nesi and Milla do a solidly respectable job of bringing it to the page. This particular conclusion. It's the end. And so there's a lot of bewildering action. There's a lot of aggression. It manages to find a nice balance between action and comedy. Brutality and horror. That sort of thing there is a considerable amount of beauty rolling into everything that feels more or less exactly where it needs to be. It all feels perfectly in sync with itself. And that's pretty good. It's just too bad that there wasn't a little bit more of a dynamic sense of delivery with respect to the overall story. It might've actually turned into something a little bit better.
It's the end of another series. And it is moving through a lot of things that I've explored before in better ways elsewhere. It's a fun, little experiment as a superficial thing. But the experiment is pretty much replicating results that we have seen before. Results of other things that go pretty far back. Decades even. And it's just too bad that Scott wasn't able to come up with something a little bit more insightful in the way he was exploring what it was that he was exploring. All of the elements are there for a really interesting Meta-fiictional journey. It's just too bad, but it didn't turn into anything decent.
