Just Read: The Pulse, Vol. 1: Thin Air by Bendis and Bagley

Jessica Jones returns, in a very thin soup that has little to do with the character from Alias. But there are more superheroes this time! And Mark Bagley draws in a solid but bland middle-of-the-road long-underwear style! And there's a Big Fight Scene! So this must be better than Alias!

Eh. Not so much.

You might guess that I didn't enjoy this as much as I did Alias (even the last story), and you would be right: it's too much standard superhero-universe furniture, with nothing terribly interesting or special about it. On the other hand, I did get it for half price, so that was about right.

This is an ensemble book, so it doesn't focus on Jones all that much to begin with; the other major characters are Ben Urich (the Marvel-verse's go-to reporter) and his boss, the slightly-less-caricatured-than-usual-but-still-not-what-one-would-call-a-rounded-character J. Jonah "I Hate Spider-Man with the Heat of a Thousand Exploding Suns" Jameson. Jameson is starting a weekly section in the Daily Bugle to focus on the super-powered crowd, to be called "The Pulse" (for no obvious reason), and Urich will write for it and Jones will...hang around, not write, and provide some nebulous insights that I imagine several dozen people in Marvel NYC could do better. (Hell, Urich knows as much or more about super-folks than Jones does. She really doesn't have a reason for being in this book, I'm sorry to say. It would have been better if she were supposed to be a writer for "The Pulse," which would at least make some sense.) The character interactions are a bit larger than life, but not completely ridiculous; these are reasonably good superhero comics (or, rather, comics set in a world with superheroes around every corner, but without any in this story all the time).

Again, Eh. I still liked Jones as a character -- she was very human and fallible -- and we don't see much of her here. (It's still the same person, at least, but she's one of many people, and not at the center of things.) Urich could be interesting, but not the way he's going here; he's too holier-than-thou to be really good. And Jameson is a buffoon; always was, always will be. Marvel can't allow his opinion to be taken seriously, because it just makes more sense than what is usually supposed to be public opinion in the MU. (Seriously -- if there were people who could destroy small countries with a thought, would you think they were wonderful and nice simply because they're supposedly good guys? I don't think so.)

Finally, no offense to Bagley, who I think is quite good at what he does, but it's not something I enjoy very much. It's clean, crisp, mainstream superhero comics, with differentiated faces but a whole bunch of panel compositions we've all seen a million times before.