My Week in Comics: Siege #2

My Week in Comics is a weekly look into my comic buying habits. Keep in mind that the reviews to be read here are not coming from a jaded, old comic book enthusiast but more of a wide-eyed fan of these monthly installments of yum or mush.

Oh, and SPOILER ALERT!

I picked up a lot of comics today, but though I would love to tell you what I thought about them, there was one issue that I just had to talk about (yes, more than Red Sonja: Wrath of the Gods), and that’s Siege # 2.

As you know, Siege is what’s being touted as the culmination of seven years of disassembling of the status quo courtesy of Brian Michael Bendis. I was not supposed to pick up Siege at all, seeing how much I trust Bendis in giving stories a satisfying ending, but with the promise of Siege being the ‘end-all’ of all the wars and invasions and disassembling and reigns for the foreseeable future, my curiosity got the better of me.

To be perfectly blunt, this doesn't read like a Bendis book. The action is intense and feels like it's actually going somewhere, instead of the tried and tested formula he did with the 'stare at each other for four issues deciding whether to fight or not' in his previous event, Secret Invasion. Hell, the staredown and subsequent slugfest between Sentry and Ares in this issue were the most cinematic series of panels I have ever seen in a comic. And that's hell of a high praise coming from me to Mr. Bendis here, but then again, he's got Oliver Coipiel on pencils.

And what pencils! Coipiel just outdoes himself with every issue. The scope in which he's rendered this entire issue just can’t be described in words. From the wide angle shots of the battle to the fight scenes, his art never misses a beat. I think it’s safe to say that Coipiel’s carrying this event to glory all by himself.

Two issue’s in and we’re already halfway through the entire event (Siege is only four issues long), and what we have to show for it are some very dead people and very pissed off gods. With all the absolutely brutal stuff happening in the first two issues alone, its ironic that the Heroic Age of Marvel will come after all this. Let's just hope that Siege does end heroically.


My rating: 4 out of 5