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A review by trike
Ms. Marvel, Vol. 7: Damage Per Second by G. Willow Wilson
2.0
This was about as subtle as Kamala hitting you with her Volkswagen-sized fists. The first issue is just a call to get out and vote, which is an important message, especially to millennials, but it was basically a clunky harangue rather than an actual story. I assume it was written before the 2016 Presidential election, but here it feels like a frustrated reaction to the event. Hopefully it'll do some good, but I doubt it.
The main story involves a self-learning virus released into World of Battlecraft, Kamala's MMO of choice, but despite the fact Wilson wrote the excellent [b:Alif the Unseen|13239822|Alif the Unseen|G. Willow Wilson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1325543155s/13239822.jpg|18330291] which covers a lot of this same ground, this been-there-done-that story is just tepid. And then somehow the virus can hack human brains and then make said humans completely invulnerable to physical force? Even for a superhero comic, which is a genre that is inherently silly, that was an out-of-nowhere escalation.
To me this felt like a mash-up of Stephen King's [b:Cell|10567|Cell|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1432828013s/10567.jpg|3017730], where phones emit a tone that drives humans insane, a "zombies but not" tale about being afraid of modern technology, and that experiment Microsoft did last year when they put a self-learning chatbot on Twitter and in less than 24 hours it became a racist, misogynist asshole as a result of the user input it received. (https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist) Which is also kind of timely, because as I write this (August 1, 2017), Facebook just did a similar experiment with a negotiation program which they unplugged because it developed a language humans couldn't understand. Not because it was malicious, despite what all the outrageously panicky headlines would have us believe, but because the point was for the programs to talk to people. (http://gizmodo.com/no-facebook-did-not-panic-and-shut-down-an-ai-program-1797414922)
Problem is, this is a clumsy version of that type of tale, and I've come to expect so much better from Wilson. Maybe she was having an off month when she wrote these scripts, but it's not even her at half speed.
The last story is slightly better, as it involves Kamala's former best friend Bruno as he attends school in Wakanda, and the adventures he gets into with his roommate. Except Bruno is limping around with progressive nerve damage, using a crutch and wearing a cast on his left arm and... I don't recall how he got into that situation. This is one of those instances where a "Previously on..." recap would've been nice. I have my previous volumes of the book to go back to, but I don't remember him getting hurt that severely. We've forgotten the dictum that "every issue is someone's first issue", clearly.
The art is done by subs, who are decent enough but nothing to write home about.
So, yeah, not stellar, sadly. After the last couple of volumes, I think I'm going to stop buying these sight unseen and start getting them from the library. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
The main story involves a self-learning virus released into World of Battlecraft, Kamala's MMO of choice, but despite the fact Wilson wrote the excellent [b:Alif the Unseen|13239822|Alif the Unseen|G. Willow Wilson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1325543155s/13239822.jpg|18330291] which covers a lot of this same ground, this been-there-done-that story is just tepid. And then somehow the virus can hack human brains and then make said humans completely invulnerable to physical force? Even for a superhero comic, which is a genre that is inherently silly, that was an out-of-nowhere escalation.
To me this felt like a mash-up of Stephen King's [b:Cell|10567|Cell|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1432828013s/10567.jpg|3017730], where phones emit a tone that drives humans insane, a "zombies but not" tale about being afraid of modern technology, and that experiment Microsoft did last year when they put a self-learning chatbot on Twitter and in less than 24 hours it became a racist, misogynist asshole as a result of the user input it received. (https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist) Which is also kind of timely, because as I write this (August 1, 2017), Facebook just did a similar experiment with a negotiation program which they unplugged because it developed a language humans couldn't understand. Not because it was malicious, despite what all the outrageously panicky headlines would have us believe, but because the point was for the programs to talk to people. (http://gizmodo.com/no-facebook-did-not-panic-and-shut-down-an-ai-program-1797414922)
Problem is, this is a clumsy version of that type of tale, and I've come to expect so much better from Wilson. Maybe she was having an off month when she wrote these scripts, but it's not even her at half speed.
The last story is slightly better, as it involves Kamala's former best friend Bruno as he attends school in Wakanda, and the adventures he gets into with his roommate. Except Bruno is limping around with progressive nerve damage, using a crutch and wearing a cast on his left arm and... I don't recall how he got into that situation. This is one of those instances where a "Previously on..." recap would've been nice. I have my previous volumes of the book to go back to, but I don't remember him getting hurt that severely. We've forgotten the dictum that "every issue is someone's first issue", clearly.
The art is done by subs, who are decent enough but nothing to write home about.
So, yeah, not stellar, sadly. After the last couple of volumes, I think I'm going to stop buying these sight unseen and start getting them from the library. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.