Seriously, what's with the tiara?
I get that superheroes need costumes, but for a character conceived as a gritty, urban vigilante, a silver (or gold, depending on the colourist) tiara seems a trifle ostentatious.
After reading his Killraven, I thought I had discovered another author to obsess over in Don McGregor. I started tracking down his work. He'd done an acclaimed couple of runs on the Black Panther, which were (and still are) notoriously difficult to find, but his Power Man stuff presented itself almost in full to me one day in the basement of Big B Comics in Hamilton. So I bought them.
They, really, are pretty much what you'd expect. Over the top dialogue, over the top villains, over the top hero. Sweet Christmas, indeed. I thought that since the new Luke Cage series had dropped over on Netflix that I would have a peek into the character's past. It's...well, I'm coming in part way through a story (McGregor's first issue, #28, is absent from the collection), so there's that. And I'd forgotten that McGregor loves his prose. While I'm all about experimentation with the form, and while the amount of prose he drops in Killraven really adds to the strange beauty of the setting, I'm not sure it's appropriate in a comic like Power Man. This is supposed to be brutal and messy, and the attempt to describe sewage smells through fairly large caption boxes seems a bit...well, it seems a bit 70s, if that makes any sense.
Anyway, I still like McGregor's stuff, but sometimes I think that his style needs to be tempered by the genre or story within which he's working. I'm still intrigued to read his Black Panther, but I think I'll have to track down a trade or something, assuming one has been published.
A bit more Power Man tomorrow, I think. I really need to find out what happens with the deadly gas that's going to destroy EVERY LIVING THING IN NEW YORK!!!!
Onward.
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