Sep
28
2016
0

Nova #11 Review

Written by: Sean Ryan

Art by: Cory Smith & Andres Mossa

Publisher: Marvel

In retrospect, it’s entirely possible that I wasn’t the best person to review this book. I’ve not been reading Nova – or Marvel in general – at all.

The thing is, I’ve been legitimately interested in Nova. I read the very first run with Sam Alexander a few years back (I think Jeph Loeb was writing it at the time) and had a ton of fun with it. I feel off after that, but I remember really liking the character. Fortunately, that seems to have carried over into Sean Ryan’s run on the book. Sam is a fun and likeable teenage character, if a little bit cliched.

To be entirely honest, this isn’t even the worst jumping on point I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read the rest of this run, or whatever others books Sam’s been showing up in, the context won’t make a ton of sense. This does lead to the book over explaining at points, and the narration is relatively dry. That said, I have to give the book props for being mostly a single conversation between two characters.

The conversation is a bit meandering, and this certainly isn’t helped by the fact that the page structures are pretty confusing. However, once I managed to piece it all together, I found myself enjoying the conversation Sam was having. There was a very human sense to the dialogue, and when the page structure wasn’t throwing me off, it felt natural.

Perhaps most importantly, this issue made me want to come back for the next one. There was a degree of weight to it that worked, even without knowledge of the events that happened previously. I obviously can’t speak for people who have read all of Sam’s story, but I would imagine that this issue is even more high impact for them than it was for me.

For the most part, I quite like the art in this book. It feels like a house style, but it still looks good, and does the job it needs to do. As I’ve referenced multiple times, the layouts are awful. It shouldn’t be this difficult to follow what’s going on in a comic. It’s a bummer, not only because it’s bad storytelling, but also because it interrupts the flow of an otherwise enjoyable comic.

Really, there’s not all that much to say about Nova #11. It’s pretty much just a fun, dialogue driven issue that gives decent insights into the characters. It’s not breaking any new ground for superhero comics, but it’s definitely an above average one of them. It’s a nice little reminder that there are books that exist just to have fun with.