Review: Defenders #2

I like Oback's colors but the Dodsons' art never sat well with me, bar Millar's TROUBLE. They're too cute for something as crass, destructively elegant and something filled with a raw endurance of badass attitude that I think Fraction wants in this book. Sorry, but for him to cleave this attitude and transfer it to me, I think he needs something more like Kirkham or Silvestri.

The plot here isn't bad, despite shoddy art, and Fraction redeems himself a bit, but it's still below what I think he can deliver.
Sometimes, not only the plot, but the dialogue gets loosey-goosey, and he doesn't utilize this team well. They can rival the best Avenger unit in my opinion, yet this powerhouse team bumbles about and mucks up. Not good when you boast Strange, Fist, Namor and Surfer.

This team gets watered down into more thinking than doing, and I see Fraction wants to swing into a high concept book here with befuddling notions and footnotes (Hickman much?) but he falls a bit short. He can deliver the goods but I think he's washing away the stink of some past Marvel outputs. The more he goes back to his indie/creator-owned stuff and his early Stark's muse, then better will the title be. For now, it's offering Casanova poems and clever etchings of ideals and precursors, to some function, that seems a bit to far out of reach...even for Fraction's grasp. Having Nul come swinging like a hungry Kong or Godzilla doesn't add any class, as this figure seems contrite and forced from a crappy event. Fraction seems to force feed his macguffin to us here...and I think he's capable of much more, with a better art team on hand soon I hope. (6/10)