Comic Reviews: Static Shock

Konnichiwa!

SO I would like to thank Terra for her awesome post yesterday! It made my day :) It was a great birthday and tonight I will be offering a great gift for you guys; The first ever Comic Book Review for the blog!!! Here are the categories: Artwork, Plot, and Character Development. A combination of the categories will be used to determine an overall score based on the 5 point system. Today I'll only be doing Static, then Spider-man on Saturday and Teen Titans and justice League on Sunday. So shall we get things started?

Static Shock #1

Marketed as DC's version of Spider-man, will Static finally reach ceiling that he's capable of?

Virgil Hawkins, the superhero otherwise known as Static Shock, is one of the many heroes that DC Comics acquired from Milestone years ago. Unfortunately, Static is the character they have done the most with, yet the best attention he has recieved was a modest role in the Teen Titans. Luckily, DC realized this and gave him his own place in the new 52 reboot. Now it's going to take a little while before Static can ttruly get off to the races, but a solid beginning is instrumental to the series success.

Now for starters, they have messed around with Static's origins and location from the old days. Virgil and his family have left Dakota City to go to The Big Apple and even has gained an extra sister. However, many things have remained the same for the series. The plot is currently playing it safe, basically just setting key pieces up for the next issue, which seems to be setting up for an epic battle between Static and the Slate gang. The biggest issue though is that writers Scott McDaniel and John Rozum have immediately dumped to the side the issues that Static brought to life during his brief stint with Milestone. Topics like racial problems, homophobia, inside look at gang violence in lesser valued states, and so on and so forth. This being said, McDaniel and Rozum have kept my interest.

Now as for character development Static is the only character to get enough limelight to be accurately judged at the moment, and shows hid trademark wittiness, vast intelligence in combat, and inability to win the public despite saving their lives multiple times. This also sounds similar to a certain marvel wall-crawler we all know. Wells Static has been doing this for quite sometime and has a completely different flare to his own predicament, he is growing closer and closer to other characters when he needs to be seperating himself from the crowd. 

Lastly, the artwork in this issue left much to be desired. McDaniel did a fantastic job when action took over the scenes, but afterwards got very lazy. Background images lose definition when not the scenery to action, characters show very little emotional contrast outside our hero, and the females all share the same smiling expression. Overall, the series was thought to be DC Comics answer to Spider-man, but Rozum and McDaniel need to stay away from copying the hero and focus and making something we have never seen before like Milestone was doing.

Artwork: 3/5

Plot: 3.5/5

Character Development: 4/5

Overall Score: 3/5

~APLIW~