America’s Got Powers #7 Review


First it was delayed. Then it was extended. Then it was delayed again. Now, finally, we reach the end of America’s Got Powers, with issue 7. Here’s the official description from Image:

Too many Americans with too many powers…so the government decides it’s time to wipe them all out and start from scratch. Nobody ever said it would be easy.

While technically accurate, that description really doesn’t convey everything that’s going on in this issue. Yes, the government decides to kill all the super powered kids, but those kids are becoming increasingly militant, and their leader’s supposedly benevolent plan is rooted in a not necessarily undeserved god-complex.

Jonathan Ross‘ story for AGP has been critical, from the start, of both U.S. politics and our obsession with reality TV (the latter critique would have been more timely a few years ago). I would have said “preachy”, rather than “critical”, but “preachy” implies a message or lesson, and we don’t get one here, other than a line about how the only people worthy of wielding power are those who are willing to give it up. And that flawed nugget of wisdom is so on-the-nose and so shoehorned into the story that it hardly counts. Yes, all the conflict comes to a head, but it’s all really just a bunch of super powered bickering, and, in the end, nothing really changes. To make matters even worse, we learn where the crystal that gave all the kids powers in the first place actually came from; SPOILERS it was a bunch of aliens using Earth as their own reality entertainment. Tommy determines we shouldn’t play their games, but if that’s the series lesson, I feel like we already learned that. Or should have known it already. And to make matters even worse(er), the book ends with more power crystals arriving all over the Earth and Ross getting to write the line “Planet Earth’s Got Powers”, which somehow manages to makes what is sure to be a global disaster kind of sweet.

I should talk about the art a bit, but I’ve already used my allotted word count in my ranting. Suffice it to say that Bryan Hitch‘s art it beautiful, though difficult to decipher in places. Colorist David Baron‘s work is a bit dull, up until the last few pages, when things start to pop. Is that supposed to mean something?

3/5

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