Friday 8 June 2012

America's Got Powers #1 & 2

America's Got Powers
Writers / Artists - Jonathon Ross & Bryan Hitch
Publisher - Image


Let me get something off my chest. I don't like Jonathan Ross. I think he's arrogant, unfunny, overexposed and self-obsessed. I didn't buy this title because of that. Unfortunately for me, I'm a sucker for good publicity. Admittedly, lots of that good publicity came from Bryan Hitch retweeting complimentary reviews on twitter, but still, a couple of people whose opinion I trust suggested it, so I picked up issues 1 & 2. An action I am now regretting. The £4.40 I spent on those two comics could have bought me a pint of ale and a packet of crisps. Or two different comics. Ones with a whiff of originality to them.


I feel really bad, sitting here on my sofa bitching about someone being derivative when the sum total of my creativity starts and ends with a poem published when I was 11, that wasn't actually very good. But heck, I'm going to do it anyway. America's Got Powers draws heavily from influences such as Hunger Games and X-Men. Okay, maybe I draw influences from these sources, and am casting unfair aspersions on the authors. I don't think so though. It just seems a bit heavy handed, harking back to the anti-mutant sentiment of X-Men but not in a way that compliments it, more in a way that says "look, we've read this and liked it so much we're using it again".


The major plot twists we have had so far were so glaringly obvious that I wondered why they even bothered to keep them a secret in the first place, and Tommy, the 'hero' is so two dimensional I can't bring myself to care about him. The art is, well, fine. The writing is, um, nice. There is nothing in these comics that reaches out and grabs me by the cojones though. Yeah, I'll probably read the rest of the series, but I'm not likely to make them release day purchases, and they'll probably sit in a long box for a while before I get around to them. 

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