Bento Review: Weirdworld Volume 0

Comic Bento’s theme this month is “Beginning” and they begin with…a trade I read once before!

Yes, it’s the Secret Wars tie-in Weirdworld, and Jimmy covered it because Jimmy does that sort of thing.  He’s still twitching over Civil War II.

Here’s the thing:  I read all the Secret Wars tie-ins as they came out, and I remember being really impressed by Weirdworld in part no doubt due to having a pretty low opinion of the premise when I heard about it.  But Jason Aaron was writing it, and he’s actually pretty good with the wild fantasy stuff as seen by his Thor run.  Plus, well, the book lived up to its title.  Weirdworld is a well-named place.

The plot deals with a minor Marvel sometime hero, sometime villain (killed in the opening pages of that JLA/Avengers thing Kurt Busiek and George Perez did the last time I saw him out Secret Wars) Arkon trying to get through the title location to get home to his realm of Polemachus.  He’s been lost in Weirdworld for he’s not sure how long, and he keeps running into things he needs to kill like squidsharks and ogres armed with modern military equipment.  My favorite may be the underwater city of Apelantis, that yes, is inhabited by apes.  Arkon doesn’t much care, but when he snags a dragon to try and fly himself home, he gains the attention of the zone’s baron, Morgan LeFey, and she isn’t happy about it.  In fact, she wants Arkon dead, assuming (incorrectly) that he’s trying to cause problems for her when Arkon really has no idea who she is.  Like I said, he doesn’t care.

By the by, Arkon is an interesting choice, but I do wonder if Aaron would have just used Conan the Barbarian if Marvel still held that license.

I don’t know if it was familiarity with the surprises the series would bring, but I found the book less interesting the second time around.  Or maybe it was just that it was fine, but it was better compared to other mini-series tie-ins that came out of Secret Wars.  Either way, Mike Del Mundo’s artwork is still fantastic, and Weirdworld is the sort of place that I wouldn’t mind seeing once in a while.  Eight out of ten Man-Thing forests.

NEXT BOOK:  We have something called Night Dominion from Oni where a bunch of misfits in a fantasy realm have to defend a city from an army.  Sounds promising.