BATTLEWORLDBATTLEWORLD

 

Round 1 fight 10

See the bracket here!

 

Giant Little Sized Marvel

Vs

X-tinction Agenda

 

I thought of only one thing when I heard of the first comic in this battle:

Giant Little Sized Marvel is an exercise in the ridiculous. A comic book starring Marvel characters as children?

 

The comic is essentially the Avengers and the X-Men as Sunday comic characters who engage in adorable little pissing contests. Issue #1 has the two teams battle over who’s culinary enterprise is going to earn the business of a hungry Toad and Blob.

 

This comic book has major nostalgia points in ways that it does and does not earn. By taking characters everyone knows, and who many grew up with, and putting them in a Saturday morning cartoon format, it manages to short circuit the part of the brain that remembers childhood things fondly. It feels like I use to watch Marvel Babies as a kid. Compare this intro:

 

with Giant Little Marvel’s intro:

There is something oddly similar, right? Look at the sing-songiness, and the way that the characters are drawn in the same scale. If it weren’t so well done it would be manipulative. The rationale behind the production of this comic is not super clear. The hand that reaches into the past to pull an invisible heart string might be an elaborate way for Marvel to make fun of itself. Regardless of that speculation, Giant Little Marvel is cheeky and fun.

Our next comic is more of an X-men story. X-tinction Agenda starts off with a flashback. This flashback is more referential than important to what’s going on. It establishes a history of a mutant-slave revolt in the country of Genosha. The point of all this is to set up that Rahne and Havok have stayed behind on Genosha to build a better tomorrow for the newly freed “mutates.”

 

The actual main conflict has nothing to do with slavery. However many years after the mutant-slave revolt, the country has been afflicted by a devastating plague. The plot deals with how Rahne and Havok enact their plan to save the people of of Genosha.

This is, without a doubt, the busiest looking comic I have ever read. The plot already starts off bogged down with a lot of backstory. As the story progresses, the plot skips around from one point to another without giving anything a chance to settle in. There is a mysterious meeting with Doom, a bedroom scene, and a ghostly premonition of Scott Summers and none of it has any gravity. I don’t know if this is solely due to bad writing or because the accompanying art is so bad. The artwork is so flashy and busy that I wonder if I can get a seizure just by looking at it.

What am I even suppose to be looking at here? The eye jumps everywhere. There is so much going on in each panel, why in addition are they divided by diagonal lines? There is no continuity. It’s overwhelming. Most of the comic is like this. The story’s plot is over complicated by the insanity that is the artwork. The artist tries so hard to make every panel fraught with excitement, only, because every panel is trying to be simulating, none of it is. Instead, it’s a manic mess.

The Results:

Giant Little Marvel runs the risk of being overly saccharine and a tad gimmicky. However I found it clever and funny. I can easily see a rendition of it in the Sunday funnies. I can’t get past how much I hated looking at X-tinction Agenda. That never-ending battle sequence on acid gave me a gnarly headache. Congratulations, Giant Little Marvel!

-Stephanie Rose

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