Dark Ages

You can also call this “The Night the Lights Went Out in the Marvel Universe,” because that’s the basic premise behind this miniseries.  When a giant robot meant to control universal entropy, but was sealed inside the Earth when it went out of control, starts waking up it’s down to the members of the superhero community to take it out.  That they manage to do this shouldn’t surprise anyone.  The thing is that, in addition to the loss of life involved, they did it in a way that has removed all electrical power from Earth.  Life goes on, everyone gets used to this, and they make a better world in the process.  Problem is that one character still wants the power of this robot for himself, and what Apocalypse sets his mind to he usually winds up getting.

“Dark Ages” comes to us from the creative team of writer Tom Taylor and artist Iban Coello.  It’s not hard to look at this and think that Marvel wanted some of that high-concept magic that Taylor brought to “DCeased” (before the writer went exclusive with DC).  The end result isn’t quite on the same level as that expansive zombie epic, but it does have its moments.  They mainly come from the writer’s skill at exploiting the freedom given to him by this world.  Things like nightly attacks by werewolves and vampires, an army of sea-bound Ghost Riders up against one of the last people you’d expect to see riding Fing Fang foom.  More sinister things like seeing what happens when the Purple Man gets his hands on a certain hero, or just enjoyably quaint stuff like Johnny Storm lending his talents to a tea party.

This is all well and good, which makes for an overall reading experience that’s best described as diverting.  The problem is that it never feels like it goes far enough with the world and its characters to be really compelling, and the ending can be best described as “anticlimactic.”  Coello’s art is nice throughout and he does a solid job with his reimagining of the characters and the world itself.  “Dark Ages” was an alright reading experience overall, but its biggest disappointment isn’t the fact that the world wasn’t fleshed out further by its creators.  No, it’s the fact that it leaves me regretting Taylor’s DC exclusivity since it means we won’t get to see him tackle Deadpool again anytime soon.  No points now for guessing who got all the best scenes here.