Written by: Mark Millar
Art by: Greg Capullo & FCO Plascencia
Publisher: Image
We’re finally 6/6 with Reborn, the rote-as-hell, high-fantasy story that C.S. Lewis did better many decades ago. That I am excited isn’t exactly a lie, though I’m excited for cynical reasons. I don’t like this book. My last three reviews for it have been nothing but negative as the series continues to be nothing but negative.
I’d call it an amusing kind of negative, but I’m no longer smiling. It’s one thing to see the stupid dog show up again and go, “I told you so!” but quite another to deliver on the promise of the blandest ending possible.
At least my predictions didn’t come true. One could argue the deus ex machina, but not well. I’ll concede it.
The biggest problem is the villain. At this point I’m used to Bonnie being a wet-blanket of a Mary Sue, but bad fiction can be saved by great villains. Hunter x Hunter has some major structural problems that drag it down, but damnit all, Hisoka and Mereum are some of the best anime villains around. They absolutely carry the show by being interesting and well thought out. They’re people.
Reborn’s big bad is none of those things, and “people” is the last word I’d use to describe him. The book opens with him alive, being a bigger edgelord than Shadow the Hedgehog, and then killing himself. He wakes up as THE BLACK MESSIAH (his words). From there he makes a machine that runs on blood, drowns people in blood, and in general, wants to kill and terrorize for no conceivable reason.
He also never shuts up.
Black-and-white morality is a common theme in high fantasy, much to the detriment of the genre. However, it can work when handled with a light touch. All the bad guys in Lord of the Rings are pretty one-note, but they’re also mostly in the background. Sauron is a big evil eye with no lines. He’s more of a natural disaster than a villain, and that works. We establish everything we need to know by how the main cast treat him: by being afraid and daunted by their task.
Sauron doesn’t need to give a big speech to his followers to be scary because that would literally do the opposite of making him scary.
Were he to give such a speech though, I trust Tolkien to do it right and not spout lines like, “you’re next for the chop,” “I’m going to ruin your life for a second time, bitch,” and “We’re going to use our powers on anyone who ever pissed us off!”
Back when I reviewed issue #4, I asked what six year old was helping write this. The question remains.
I’d talk about the actual ending, but this is a high-fantasy book with a prophesy. You know how it ends. I suppose the good news is that, for all of my complaints, it at least executes the end with some level of grace. I think? It’s not great by any means—and there’s no tension at all because the characters suck and the thing is predictable—but the quick shifts back to the regular world with Bonnie suffering a stroke in the hospital were nice touches.
Granted, they were confusing at first, but nice in retrospect. One could argue they add some unreliability to Bonnie’s Mary-Sue adventure, though the interview at the end of the book sort of squashes that hope.
When it comes to the artwork, this is some of the best the series has done. I still like the monster design, and some of the fighting at the end is cool if not a bit busy. The fairy folk also make great use of color. I still hate Bonnie’s design though, and her big sword fight is pretty boring all things considered. It also ends on a joke, further establishing that there is no tension to it at all. Thankfully the bad guys have some big monsters at their disposal to add actual mayhem, you know, the thing climactic fights should have.
Reborn has been a very strange series. The first issue was wonderful. I will not take that away. After that though, it was just a steady decline into the most mediocre high-fantasy affair imaginable. It ends that way too, but with better execution than I imagined going in. It’s still not good, but I feel like this book clawing its way up to mediocre is a pretty big achievement given what’s transpired over the last half year.
I tip my stupid looking biker/space helmet to you, Reborn. I then take that helmet off my head because it looks stupid.
