Saturday, June 23, 2007
Comic Art
As we consider once again the Omnipotents, we turn to another such character, one of the "Elders of the Universe" - The Grandmaster. There is very little to separate The Grandmaster from The Beyonder, whom we have previously discussed except that he does not look like a reject from a bad eighties coming-of-age film.
Like the Beyonder, he started out mostly as a plot device - a reason to get the whole gang into one room, and for the editor-in-chief to hijack the story lines of all the titles. In this case the mini-series was the Contest of Champions and was based on a bet between the Grandmaster himself and Death. (We will not be looking at Death in this series on Omnipotents because in comics Death is anything but.)
The Grandmaster makes a return as plot device in one of the better things to happen in comics recently and that is a cross-over mini-series featuring the Justice League and the Avengers. Once again the Grandmaster was part of the plot device to get these two together, but what a meeting! So many characters, a plot thinner than water, but who cares! The miniseries was a feast for the eyes. Big splash pages featuring every hero imaginable - Superman trading blows with Thor -- Flash and Quicksilver running circles around everybody -- Hawkman and Angel flying high above it all - and so it went. It was just a wonder to behold. Oh yeah, and Batman squaring off with Captain America - that is something I have wanted to see since I was old enough to read. Of course, it was inconclusive and everybody ended up buddies, it had to be that way. But again, what matters the story, it's impossible to tell a good story given the tools at hand, but every page was worth savoring.Related Tags: comics, comic books, comic art, Omnipotents, The Grandmaster, Contest of Champions, JLA/Avengers
