(no subject)

[labellementeuse]

Okay, so, I fiiinally got hold of SPN: origins on tuesday, nearly a week after the rest of the developed world, but I deal, and I review.

Synopsis: the main story, John-focused as we already knew, follows the first few days post-Mary's death. It opens with John expositing to the universe in general and Ded Mary In The Hill (he proposed to her in this location, and I should find this very moving, but I do not.) He forwent a funeral for Mary, in line with CSPWDT canon, and now he is trying to find what killed her despite struggling with taking care of Dean who won't talk and Sammy who won't stop crying "like he's got something terrible inside him." I saw a review that said this implied Sam already had, like, the Seeds of Evil, and on reflection I suppose it does, but my first runthrough I only thought it meant that, you know, his mommy just got pinned to the ceiling and burnt alive. But anyway.

He proceeds to bug neighbours, firemen and cops until they tell him to Shut Up, Daddy and go away, which he does to talk to Julie, Mary's best friend who he's staying with (I don't know what happened to his co-worker from the Home cut scenes, but IMO it's fair enough not to consider these canon. Although then we lose the delicious CYFS/CPS/whatever the US acronym is phonecall, which is a shame.) Julie also thinks he's craaaaazy, and should, like, go to work more and spend time with his kids. Uh-uh, says John, and goes out to hustle pool - this is kind of fun, it's interesting to see John doing this so early - when he bumps into a gorgeous much MUCH younger Missouri, also playing pool. Which is cool. There is banter, and then he meets her in her trailer where she gives him the Truth is Out There speech.

John and Missouri do some spooky trance vision thing involving ripping out one of John's fingernails, which I think is a, um, nice? touch, to see in a bit more depth what magic in the Superverse involves. But anyway, in her spooky trance Missouri sees The Writing On The Wall, and it says: "we're coming." L'il inexperienced John trips along to find out (after a fabulously creepy bit with Missouri sensing a child crying for its mommy but only finding a doll - this implies some stuff for the way Missouri's psychic shit works. I would spec. that she's picking up either on psychic traces left by the girl who owned the doll, or possibly an unquiet spirit tied to the doll, Provenances-style) that what it really says is "We're coming for the children," and he's not inexperienced enough not to realise that, oops! he done left his kids with a defenseless wimmin! Um, because you could do exactly what, John, if the demon decided to go through you? This is not Harry Potter, you cannot die to save them, dumbass. Anyway, he sprints home to find Julie very very shredded and Dean and Sammy.... mysteriously fine. How altogether ooky!

John guilts for a refreshingly brief single panel until Missouri tells him to run like a rabbit (oma, rapiti, oma, oma, oma!) while handing him a Mysterious Artefact that.. looks like a crooked elephant tusk with symbols carved into it. LAME symbols, like pi and spirals.

The back-up story is a Geoff Johns/Phil Hestor effort that's basically just fun, in a heartclutching way, and you can see full scans of it here at the super-wiki.

OK, so, review:

The Good

I really enjoyed getting a small sense of, for example, the abilities and limitations of psychics like Missouri in this universe, and how quickly John slipped into the obsessive patterns we see in him in the show. I loved Missouri although Julie seemed like a wasted character just put there to die. Otherwise I liked it and it seemed emotionally very in-line with canon. Also, the backup story was excellent.

The Bad

On the other hand, I don't know how much I thought the main story really added to my understanding on John's origins. The back-up story was much better at this, by combining what we know about the boys with something emotionally fresh. There were also one or two notable deviations from canon - I kind of would have preferred for them to have stuck with the story from Home, although I defend their right to change it, and it's very bad luck that the episode confirming Mary's birthday as being in December aired the same week the comic giving her birthday as being the same as her death-day in November came out. Oops.

I really disliked having a throwaway character like Julie just to kill her brutally - it kind of seemed pointless and I don't understand what it meant about Sammy.

I also was not a fan of Missouri's Panels of American Angst - "ever noticed how it don't look so much like those postcards from the 50s anymore?" Well, no, but I'm pretty sure the 50s didn't look like the postcards either. The whole world-getting-so-much-worse schtick tends to annoy me.

The Art

I liked the art! In general! I really did! There was nothing at all wrong with Hester's art for sure, and I only have a couple of quibbles with the main story art, mostly to do with how Sam was drawn, because jeeze. He's six months old, seriously, a baby, not a toddler. And, also, it's hard to tell if this is a scripting error or an art error, but the persistent station wagon instead of the Impala - I know this annoyed a lot of people and well, I'm not made of stone, it made me sad too. :( Since that's definitely the Metallicar John's sitting on in the pilot.

So overall comments? Well, I know it seems like the bad outweighed the good, but actually I enjoyed this and I'm excited about next month (although maybe that has to do with Runaways, Teen Titans, and Buffy also coming out the same week. *sigh* Why is every book I buy in on the same week?) It'll be good to see them heading into some truly unexplored territory, stuff we don't know anything about from canon.