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A review by trike
Noble Vol. 1: God Shots by Brandon Thomas
2.0
I really wanted to like this. This is a bog-standard superhero story which is sliced up into pieces and presented out of order in an attempt to disguise its reliance on standard tropes. It fails at that.
Some sort of Magic Asteroid grants abilities to astronauts working for a private corporation, whose CEO is a murderous Mexican woman who is manipulating everyone in order to... we don’t know. It’s never explained, despite 130 pages of story. Maybe he’s going to go with the superhero version of Alan Dean Foster’s The Man Who Used the Universe (1983) but it’s hard to tell.
Basically Thomas has taken the plot of J. Michael Straczynski’s superb Rising Stars (1999) with a bit of the Fantastic Four (1963) and added characters from the TV series Heroes (2006) and attempted to emulate that “unravel the mystery” feeling both of them have. Which in theory I am totally down with. I *want* another cool superhero story along those lines. This just isn’t that.
Throw in some of the tropes that I despise (he woke up without a memory!) and make it a jumbled mess and you’ve lost me. As you can tell from my references to previous works, much of this story feels derivative, just not in a cool “if you liked that then you’ll also like this” sort of way.
The art is decent, so there’s that.
Some sort of Magic Asteroid grants abilities to astronauts working for a private corporation, whose CEO is a murderous Mexican woman who is manipulating everyone in order to... we don’t know. It’s never explained, despite 130 pages of story. Maybe he’s going to go with the superhero version of Alan Dean Foster’s The Man Who Used the Universe (1983) but it’s hard to tell.
Basically Thomas has taken the plot of J. Michael Straczynski’s superb Rising Stars (1999) with a bit of the Fantastic Four (1963) and added characters from the TV series Heroes (2006) and attempted to emulate that “unravel the mystery” feeling both of them have. Which in theory I am totally down with. I *want* another cool superhero story along those lines. This just isn’t that.
Throw in some of the tropes that I despise (he woke up without a memory!) and make it a jumbled mess and you’ve lost me. As you can tell from my references to previous works, much of this story feels derivative, just not in a cool “if you liked that then you’ll also like this” sort of way.
The art is decent, so there’s that.