Imperial #3
This issue is more of the same from issues 1&2. Imperial and Mark try to find some common ground ground and train Mark to take over the Imperial crown (literally) as the power inside the crown has demanded. Mark shows some progress in mastering the powers but doesn’t have the commitment to being the hero that the current Imperial is showing. Imperial confesses that he no longer needs food or drink and doesn’t desire sex or maintain any sort of human life. No Peter Parker for this Spider-man.
Mark suddenly has to bail on his training early to take care of his like and Imperial doesn’t fight him on it which is a break in the pattern from the earlier issues. I don’t know why they don’t schedule some training time if you’re really committing to this thing. Don’t just show up and start training without having some time set aside, but I guess Imperial doesn’t have access to Mark’s GCal.
There’s another hint dropped here that makes you think that this might be a stress induced hallucination, but like someone trying to drag this concept out to six issues, it’s deliberately obtuse. I think this is going to be the pattern for the foreseeable future of this book: A training montage that shows some improvement and frustration, a moment that makes Imperial and Mark understand one another better and a hint at this all being fake. This is the last issue I own, so I will probably never find out. I’m not adverse to reading a little bit more of this story but I probably won’t spend a lot of time and effort hunting it down. If I stumble upon it at a library one day I might check it out.
It’s odd, because I think this comic is really well done and very professionally executed but it’s not drawing me in enough to make me want to spend my dollars or time figuring it all out. The writing is pleasantly sparse, which means it doesn’t spend a lot of time on pure exposition nor does it do more tell than show, which means that the writer and artist are working together to tell the story in a way that is uniquely suited to comics. This is the kind of thing I would expect from Steven T. Seagle, and even the twist of this all being a stress induced hallucination is right up his alley. One of his more famous works is mostly about himself and his wrestling with the concept of Superman after being asked to write the character by DC and the inability to fathom a story to make the Man of Steel relevant or vulnerable in any way that wasn’t cliche. I do expect that this book will pay of fin some way that I can’t foresee right now but it hasn’t ramped up my interest enough by issue three to get on board and wait for that ship to come in.
Comic read on 11/12/2017 at home in bed on a lazy morning.
