by Dalibor Talajic (Illustrator), Max Bemis (Writer)
There have been four characters calling themselves the
Foolkiller, this deals with the second one, who is now out of a mental
institution, gotten a degree in psychoanalysis, and is attempting to cure
psychopath supervillains on behalf of what he believes is SHIELD. When he can’t
cure them of their foolishness, he kills them. This is the basic plot at the
beginning and it stays good for a while, but either the author became bored or
sales were down and the story became very meta quickly. It was ground-breaking
when Grant Morrison did it back in the ‘80s with Animal Man. Now it’s old hat,
especially when you toss Deadpool in there as this comic does. I suppose it was
supposed to come across as witty, but instead it seems lazy, as if the writer
couldn’t come up with a serious plot, or thought they were better than the
material so they decided to half-ass it with ‘witty banter” and now-dated pop
culture references. Either way, I’ve read the meta-commentary and its been done before.
I know this sounds stupidly fanboy, but it really bugged
me that the Foolkiller presented here, Greg Salinger is brown haired rather
than the blonde he has always been portrayed as - and this brown hair appears
in all of his flashbacks, so it's a definite oversight. Maybe it’s stupid, but
I have mad love for the Foolkiller limited series from the 1990s - which has
never been collected for some weird reason - and it is easily one of the
darkest and best comics Marvel has ever produced. So when the third Foolkiller
shows up, not written by comic legend Steve Gerber, and a piss-poor job is done
in writing this character, I have to tune it out.
As you may have guessed by now, I really didn’t enjoy
this comic too much. The art by Dalibor Talajic was excellent however, stylish
yet sticking to the Marvel esthetic. It was probably the only thing that kept
me reading, as the story got worse and worse. The very end however wsa good and
fit in with the character of the second Foolkiller, even if the third
Foolkiller was really a different character than I had read before. I really
wished he hadn’t been ruined like this.
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