cm_cameron's Spider-Man Noir: Eyes Without A Face #4 - Part 4: Endless Night review

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    That Cover Is Every Bad Dream I've Ever Had About The Dentist

    THE BASICS

    The final showdown takes place here. Spider-Man may have arrived to late to save Robbie, but there's still plenty of time to make Octavious pay for what he's done.
     

    MY COMPLIMENTS TO THE CHEF

    • I'm gonna be pretty hard on this issue, so I should probably clarify here that, for all its faults, Eyes Without a Face tells a good story with pretty good writing. It's also got quite a few entertaining moments in it. That said, it suffers from a few problems that I don't easily forgive, such as...

    FEEL THE STING OF MY DISCONTENT!

    • To me, tragic events work best when they have happy moments to contrast with. It gives the horrific events more meaning. Tell me, which hypothetical do you think is more emotionally affecting: Someone's legs being broken by a cruel mob boss, or someone who we've seen enjoy expressing themselves through dance having their legs broken by a cruel mob boss? It's the latter one, right? Right. In this comic, plenty of bad things happen, but we really don't have anything to contrast them with, which makes the events feel cheap. It's one thing to want to tell a dark tale full of bad people doing bad things to good people, but if you don't include some happy moments in there somewhere, not only will the relentless dark tone become tiresome, but you'll lose the chance to really affect the reader.

    • The villains failed to deliver. They did evil things sure, but nothing about them was intimidating in any way. I think that might have been a case of David Hine spreading his resources too thin. While I praised the series initially for doing a good job of balancing the two major villains' stories (a compliment that still stands), I think dividing up the time between the Crime Master and Doc Ock kept us from spending the time we would have needed with them to see some truly intimidating acts of evil. Instead, we see just enough to know that both of them aren't very nice guys, but that's about it. That's not even to mention the person who apparently masterminded the whole thing, who we see for a total of about five pages in the whole series doing nothing but talking on the phone. Oooh, scary.

    • You have Curt Conners in your cast and you don't bring in the Lizard? Pffft!

    WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE

    It's a shame really. Spider-Man fits really well into the Noir genre, but this series falls pretty flat. It's not a total waste of time, but mood and feel can only take you so far. Even a good story can't last indefinitely without good character support, which is what this series really lacked.

    Overall series rating: 2.0/5.0

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