After the lukewarm review I gave to the first volume, you might wonder why I read Brian Bendis’ Powers: Roleplay and Powers: Little Deaths . The answer is twofold: I’ll gladly keep reading graphic novels that are merely decent; and I’d already ordered a whole set of ‘em from Amazon, and could hardly let them go unread.
The second volume was, if anything, even slighter and less necessary than the first; but Little Deaths was actually reasonably good. Perhaps this is Bendis’s skills evolving as he goes? Since I have a few more trade paperbacks sitting on my shelf to be read, we can hope so.
Two random gripes: First, I had an unusually difficult time following the flow of dialog bubbles. I suspect this is partly because Bendis’s snap-snap banter necessitates far more dialog interplay than usual; but it’s partly because the layout just falls down now and then. Second, the proofreading is terrible. Misspellings, inconsistent spellings of character names, and homonyms (”you’re” for “your”, that sort of thing) pop up far too often. Together, these two problems made the books feel decidedly amateurish. Or, if you’re an optimist, made them feel edgy and indie!
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