Biting The Hand That Feeds Me Reviews: Planet of the Capes
Sugar daddy of the Comics Blogosphere
Larry Young graciously sent
me a review copy of the upcoming
Planet of the
Capes,
which was especially gracious considering I still haven't reviewed the
other comics he sent me over a month ago. (Insert clichéd
Catholic
guilt here.) So I feel bad that I didn't like the book more than
I
did. (Catholic guilt now off the charts, which is especially bad
considering I'm not even Catholic anymore.)
Let's start with the good. I loved the slogan on the back
cover:
"Nobody Learns Anything. Everybody Dies." Great, I
thought: an
unsentimental look at superhero comics. And while the book
certainly
is unsentimental, it's also unsatisfying. At the end I felt I had
read
an interesting idea for a story more than a finished work.
In
her
review,
Laura Gjovaag mentioned that she was won over from page one because
she's "such a sucker for alternate history stories, and the alternate
story of how Benjamin Franklin supported the raven as the national bird
instead of the turkey or the eagle was very cool." Other than
that,
though, there wasn't really much that stood out as "alternate" about
the
PotC world, so in my case it bugged me from the
beginning. Why start out the story that way if it's not really
important to the story?
Things didn't improve from there. We're introduced to the first
of the heroes inhabiting the
Planet of the Capes,
Raven, as he's on his way to an emergency scene. He's interrupted
by a
young boy seeking Raven's autograph. It was amusing to see this
Batman analogue act all grim-and-gritty before he eventually caves and
gives the kid an autograph, but it was also distracting in terms of the
overall story: Wouldn't it be better for Raven to come back and
sign
autographs later, after he'd helped deal with the situation at hand?
That situation, by the way, is one of Raven's teammates, Schaff,
rampaging through the city, à la the
Ultimates
version of the Hulk. Plus, Schaff is holding on to a baby girl as
he has his little property damage tantrum. Bizarrely, another
hero, Kastra
(Schaff's daughter), tells the girl's mother not to worry because
Schaff "just wants to show you a good time." By smashing cars and
holding a toddler hostage? Uh, OK. Kastra finally goes to
"rescue"
the women's child, but along the way she stops to give the same
boy from before an autograph. I guess that mom will just have to
wait while Kastra
does more important things, like flirt with an underage admirer. When
the
mother is finally reunited with her child, she runs off,
frightened.
Kastra is visibly annoyed, cracking, "No thanks needed, ma'am.
Just
doing our job." Yeah, who does that ungrateful mother think she
is,
not even thanking you for saving her daughter from your violently
destructive father? Sheesh!
Later an accident transports Raven, Schaff, Kastra, and a fourth hero,
Grand, to another world, one unpopulated by superheroes. Out of
the
blue, Grand (a Superman stand-in) decides to turn evil and take over
the world. His reason? Because on this world there are no
other
superheroes to stop him. The only problem is that, for all we
readers know, Grand's home world didn't have any other superheroes
either. It's not a strict inconsistency by any means: We
can imagine
that the other world was teaming with superbeings. But the fact
that
no other superheroes were ever mentioned or depicted earlier in the
story does lessen the impact of Grand's actions at the end.
In the end,
Planet of the Capes was a frustrating
read. I felt as though there were some good ideas in there but
they're never fully executed in any satisfying manner. I never
cared about any of the characters, nor was I interested in any of the
situations they found themselves in. One might argue that 72
pages isn't enough space in which to introduce brand-new superheroes
and make readers care about them, but Kurt Busiek has done it with even
fewer pages in issues of
Astro City. I wish I could
recommend
PotC, but I can't. Your $12.95 would be
better spent snatching up the early issues of
Demo.
