The Good
To be honest, the only good thing about this issue is that it didn't commit any terrible tropes that would have made my rating worse. When the only good thing I can say about it was "well, it wasn't total crap — it was just so stunningly mediocre that it wasn't worse", there's a problem.
The Bad
To be honest, there's a lot I had problems with in this issue. For reasons I'll go into in "The Verdict," I found that a lot of events in this issue were cobbled together from other comics.
Spider-Man's "oh, there's a police chopper firing on my superhero battle, now I must save it from getting shot down!" scene? Yeah, it's here.
The Batman "villain wakes up dangling from a skyscraper"? Yeah, that's here too.
The "I'm a tough guy from the street, let me infiltrate your gang" speech that's been used by Cage, Punisher and other street-level bruisers? That's here too.
And to be honest, Virgil can't pull them off at all. They just feel like they've been copy-pasted because they worked once; why not try them again here?
The Verdict
When I read Static, I can't help but feel like I've been re-reading something that I've already experienced before. So many of the tropes in this story are carelessly lifted from other heroes in an attempt to legitimize Virgil, and it doesn't wear too well on him. It's like he's taken Peter Parker's old, lame, moth-hole-filled suit and tried to pass it off as Versace.
All I want for Static is to find a voice that's uniquely his. I don't want him quipping like Spidey, intimidating like Batman or playing the tough guy like Luke Cage. Trying to present him as some sort of super-amalgamation of "what works" is one way to make sure that the book won't have the originality it needs to move forward.
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