“I had fun with it. TOTALLY not for everyone. I think if you weren’t a 90’s member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society, this probably won’t do a whole lot for you. But if you WERE, I think this one is a little better than you might expect.
It’s a little clunky in places. I don’t love that each issue ends with a straight-up, no images dialog between Aaron Stack and The Watcher. But on the other hand, I DID like that it spelled out the story pretty clearly for us lunkheads. Because I definitely would not have understood otherwise.
It uses these text bits differently than, say, Watchmen, where most of the text is filling in the world and really unnecessary to the main story. This is story-critical stuff. Which made me sort of hate it, but sort of like that we had this device to do the heavy story lifting and we could let the comics part be comics.
The art is cool. The covers, Alex Ross, are of course spectacular. This might’ve been him around his height. But the interior art is different, not Alex Ross stuff like Marvels and Kingdom Come. So be prepared. That said, I think it’s got a distinct style, and it fits an alternate Earth. I just wouldn’t have minded another full Alex Ross book.
The joke I made after this came out was, “Alright, we need a new story. What if Thor…was a chick!? And then Spider-Man…we’ll make him a chick!?” Because that’s what it looks like based on the covers (and, okay, it happens a little bit).
But it’s not really about that. There’s in-story, continuity reasons for all of it, which is kind of cool, and a big bonus for dorks, whale penises like myself.
The other thing to like about this story, it’s alternate-world, but it’s not asking a question like, “What if Thor…was a chick!?” It’s asking a question more like, “What if Reed Richards…wasn’t different at all, but had achieved maximum Reed Richards?” That’s a more interesting question, to me. What do these characters look like when stretched to their logical conclusions? What does Captain America look like after World War XXVII, when world war numbers start to look like Super Bowl numbers? What does Spider-Man look like when he gives up his webs? Well, he looks fat. But that’s getting very literal. Also, I just wanted to put in Thing’s great one-liner: “Whoa, when did you get bitten by a radioactive spare tire?” Classic.
The Daredevil subplot was bizarre and very cool, the designs on the Inhumans were great, the story was maybe a little overly-complicated, but conceptually different and interesting, and it’s a damn decent entry into Marvel canon.”