The Sorcerer And Pandora's Box
Johnny is all catchphrases and hokey dialogue this month as he battles the endless pit that is the mythical Pandora's Box which is relentlessly controlled at the whim of a guy called The Sorcerer. Now, aside from the fact that Robert Bernstein has been getting on my nerves the past couple of months with his overdrawn, humourless and banal listings of powers (I looked him up and found that he worked primarily at DC on Superman and Aquaman—go figure), there's the fact that even though he is given the freedom to have great banter between Johnny and the other three of his Fantastic Four, such moments are just as tepid and uninteresting.
To be fair, this is one of the better issues as of late that hasn't featured the names Spider-Man or Fantastic Four, but that wouldn't be hard seeing as Bernstein has been working on mostly everything else. It's the concept (no doubt dreamt up by Lee, and perhaps Kirby) at hand which is the most interesting despite it being used dubiously (Pandora's Box; containing all the evils of the world, is used to make bullets lazy and therefore move really slow, for instance) and without much interest to the reader. So yeah, another waste of time, though you could do worse... I guess.
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