Recently reviewed by me at CBR: Omega the Unknown #10, about which I write the following sentences: "The explosive climax of issue #9 has not literally rendered everyone deaf, but that's what it feels like. The silence permeates all of the small moments here, as characters say goodbye, move on with their lives, or fall in with an underground-dwelling homeless crowd recreating some bizarre superhero version of Hollywood Squares -- I'm not sure what that last part's about, exactly, but the image of the emaciated Omega being lifted into his square next to the guy in the Mink costume perfectly captures the tone Lethem, Rusnak, and Dalrymple have been striving for. It's not an image you'd expect in the final issue of a Marvel comic. It's not a grand, heroic triumph. It's a weird, underground, unnoticed-by-the-rest-of-society triumph, not of order over chaos, but of inspiration. These characters will live on -- their exploits will be celebrated and retold by society's underdwellers."Read the entire review HERE.
3 comments:
The silence is symbolic. Up to this point, The Overthinker has been babbling on and on and on about how what we're seeing is actually a critical struggle which we should take seriously. You may recall from the end of chapter 9 that The Overthinker was destroyed. So here we have the world without all the verbosity, so that we can see for ourselves that nothing has really amounted to much. Alex leaves everyone in exactly the same state he found them, Omega becomes a pathetic relic just like the tap-dancer who claims to be the best in the world, and yet there are still Mink Men and there is still nanotechnology. The point of the Holywood Squares at the end is to show that Omega has resigned himself to serving people who are only pretending to be what he genuinely can be. (The Nowhere Man's reappearance is to show that he's trying to make himself feel better about the whole tragic ending by imagining he's somewhere else.) If The Overthinker were still around, we'd have page after page of reassurance that this all means something. But it doesn't really.
That sounds right to me.
I really wish I had the whole series here in front of me, but I'll have to wait until August to reread the whole thing.
Good stuff, Mory.
I have to say I dropped this with the first issue. I'm going to have to pick up the trade along with the original when they're both available together.
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