Customer Reviews

Powers: The Definitive Hardcover Collection, Vol. 2

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well, I've been waiting over three years for this book.

The story is very good. It is definitely darker than what is in the first volume, but it is intriguing to the end. The story has a couple unexpected twists and takes the reader to unexpected places, which I appreciate.

Unfortunately, we had to wait a long time for this collection, supposedly to get the production correct. That be fine if there weren't still problems with the book. The most glaring is the printing of a page twice. More subtle is the jagged look of the line art at times. It's as if the oversized volume was created from scans of the regular comics, so the lines aren't very crisp. This is especially true of a lot of the text. It's distracting considering they had such a long time to get it "right".

Hopefully the next volume will come out before 2012.

The stories in this issue are stronger than the previous volume, which means that they are better then almost all of what is currently on the shelves. Problems with production values though are still present. They come in the form of art that at many spots looks scanned from inferior copies and also binding of pages that leaves some art/dialogue difficult to read. These problems are much less noticeable than the previous collection but if those really bothered you they are not gone.

Until a few months ago, I had never read Powers and when I randomly took a Powers book from my library, I was instantly hooked on it to the point where I stopped claiming that Frank Miller and Alan Moore said all that there is to say about superheroes and that we should just let the genre die (I would say that a lot). I read this one somewhere in the middle of reading the rest of the series (Powers Vol. 5: Anarchy - which makes up the last few chapters of this collection) and I must say that it is much more fun when you get the Behind the Music style that the writer was going for.

So this collection deals with groupies (Little Deaths), One Hit Wonders (Shark), Supergroups assembled by record companies who don't necessarily like each other (Supergroup - aka the Fugees) and Punk Rock (Anarchy) which sees the whole superhero (super rcok star) institution and seeks to tear it apart.

I'm actually amazed at the fact that all anyone really had to do to revive the superhero genre was to adapt it to another popular culture phenemenon (in this case rock stars) and run with it. I'm surprised because I have been so accustomed to superhero comics eating their own tales that I figured the only way for these things to be relevant would be to just trash it all and start over. I was wrong and I am happy to say that Bendis proved me wrong.

This collection is, in my opinion, better than volume 1(which I love by the way, buy it), in terms of it having more issues and also having it's fair share of interviews and "behind the scenes" stuff, it takes longer to read then vol. 1. I hadn't read Powers until this collected editions came out and I'm now hooked, if only vol. 2 hadn't taken so long to come out...
Definetly worth your buck, this one and vol. 1.