Free Agents #3 // Review
Superstar is loved. He’s a big name superhero. (He’s got his own theme song and everything.) Of course he’s loved. And he NEEDS that love. It feeds his power directly to him. (He’s kind of weird that way.) People know that he needs that love. Otherwise how is he going to be able to defeat a ridiculously large king crab in Lake Michigan near the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago? Things are starting to get even more weird in Free Agents #3. The writing team of Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza continues a superhero experiment with the aid of artist Stephen Mooney and colorist Triona Tree Farrell.
The Free Agents have a problem with Superstar. Why? Well...it turns out that he has a problem with them. His problem with them has quite a lot to do with where they are. Precisely where they are happens to be on private property that he’s kind of in charge of keeping private. And since Superstar just happens to be very, very popular at the moment, he just happens to be very, very powerful. Things aren’t going to be easy for the Free Agents, who are going to have a hell of a time meeting their objectives.
And honestly, it’s all pretty tedious. Busiek and Nicieza seem to be having a pretty fun time building the world that they’re bringing to the page, but they’re not doing a great deal of work trying to make any of the characters at all seem all that appealing, interesting or even distinct. They’re just throwing a whole bunch of vaguely familiar-looking characters at the page and hoping they might generate enough interest to keep the pages turning amidst superhero tropes that by now feel like an echo of an echo of an echo that doesn’t really have a whole lot of reality of its own.
Mooney’s work doesn’t help matters a whole lot. He’s got a lot of the basic form, motion and emotion of a superhero team book down more or less perfect, but it lacks the kind of immediacy needed to really draw-in the reader on any significant level. It’s all pretty light from beginning to end and none of it feels terribly compelling even in and amidst quite a lot of action and locations that seem to keep flitting briskly from one location to the next. Really...even in absence of a whole lot of interesting characterization, there SHOULD be enough physical action to draw-in the reader on a surface level, but it never really comes together.
A group of inter dimensional heroes present in a vaguely recognizable superhero world SHOULD be the type of thing that would naturally sort of draw-in a reader, but FreeAgents never really manages to make much of an impression as it struggles about on the page more or less fruitlessly. It’s not that the third issue in the series completely lacks any appeal at all...it’s just that it doesn’t feel interesting enough to make much of an impression on a crowded comics rack for superheroes.
Grade: D+
