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| Wednesday, June 27, 2007 09:18 AM |
| Bullet Points - A Review |
 by Fëanor |
Bullet Points is a book I ended up buying online when I couldn't find it in the comic book store. It's a trade paperback collection of a series by J. Michael Straczynski based on an interesting premise: what if the scientist who developed the super soldier serum that turned Steve Rogers into Captain America had been killed 24 hours earlier? In other words, what if Rogers had never become Captain America? How would the Marvel Universe be different?
These sounded like interesting questions to me, and I was excited to see how JMS would answer them. But ultimately I was disappointed. JMS's story ends up being too contrived, manipulative, clumsy, and melodramatic for my taste.
Also killed in the attack on Captain America's creator is Ben Parker, who just happens to be one of the MPs assigned to protect the scientist. Ben Parker, of course, is Uncle Ben to Peter Parker - or would have been, had he lived. Because he did not, and there was no strong male role model and moral center in Peter Parker's life, the boy ends up as a punk who sneaks out of class on the day he would have been bitten by the radioactive spider, and thus never becomes Spider-Man. Instead, he steals a jeep with a bunch of other punks, drives out into the desert (the desert near NYC? Huh?), stumbles into a military testing ground looking for gas for the jeep, and ends up taking the full force of a gamma bomb blast, which turns him into... the Incredible Hulk!
Meanwhile, Steve Rogers, so obsessed with serving his country that he'll try anything, agrees to take part in the government's back-up super soldier program: the Iron Man project.
So yeah. Pretty much JMS just takes this chance to shuffle around the roles of the various characters in the Marvel Universe. Richard Reed ends up becoming Nick Fury (although only after he's been forced to scream "NNNOOOOO!!!" after his loved ones are killed), Bruce Banner ends up as Spider-Man. And it all feels very silly and deliberate, and not a natural progression and ripple effect caused by one altered event, as JMS is continually describing it. And that's another annoying thing about this story - at the beginning of every chapter he goes back and tells us again about the science behind how bullets work, and uses it as a metaphor for how one bullet can change things so completely. But it just feels like he's hitting us with a hammer with his point, while not really making his point very effectively. In fact the one bullet didn't change all this; he did, by deliberately reaching in and tweaking the story so that the heroes we knew would still exist but in different forms.
Admittedly, the book has its good parts. I did rather enjoy the conception of the Hulk as an angry, misunderstood teenager acting out, which almost makes more sense than the original conception of the Hulk. It was also fun to see the Hulk fighting Iron Man, just like is actually happening now in the Marvel Universe. The art, which has a kind of abstract, painterly quality, is pretty neat. And the end of the book, when all the heroes and villains must rise up together to fight Galactus, and even the Hulk takes part, is actually legitimately moving.
But still, in general it feels like a failed exercise. I keep comparing it in my head to one of my favorite "what if?" comic book stories, Red Son, and it keeps coming up lacking. Red Son took its one change - landing Superman in Soviet Russia instead of America - and ran with it, using this transformation of the central hero of the DCU to examine issues of politics, power, morality, and ethics, and ideas like balancing the safety of one's people against their personal freedom and privacy. Whereas JMS's book doesn't really take a hard look at anything - it's just an exercise, an excuse to shuffle things around. |
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