Comic review: Black Science #13- Kill everybody and start again

Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Matteo Scalera
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 1st April 2015


It looks like Rick Remender is going old testament on his Black science creation, realising that things have got a bit messy he’s deciding to change things up, and changing things up means lots of death and lots of nastiness.

It had to be done. The book was getting far too convoluted with various versions of the same characters popping up from different dimensions, and with these different characters interacting with different dimensional versions of themselves, their friends and families it was getting almost impossible to follow, or care about what was going on.

Issue # 13 is a recognition that the book went off the rails, and as the issue concludes Rick even admits that he’s going to start killing people off. He doesn’t admit that his book was becoming a convoluted, confusing mess, but he’s not exactly going to do that in his own book, is he?

Issue #14 is going to be the interesting one, which unfortunately means that issue #13 is in a nowhere land of reversing mid-stream, setting the stage for what is to come, but not really being an essential book in and of itself.

There are telling moments in the book where the writer acknowledges within the text that he is peddling clichés. The first is when a character acknowledges that he is a ‘The cliched breadwinning, middle-aged workaholic.’ You sure are mate, blame the writer. The second moment is when a character acknowledges the weakness of his own dialogue by stating that he's just saying it because, ‘I read it in a comic'. That’s not funny, it's just very poor, very lazy writing that is attempting to cover itself with a knowing joke.

It doesn’t work. Lazy writing is lazy writing, and covering it up with moments of Kevin Smith over analysis of everything that is happening as it bloody happens, doesn’t cover up your lack of creativity, imagination and inspiration.

There’s also the Kevin Smith swearing thing going on in this book as well, using creative (and disgusting) swearing to try to convince people that what they are reading is ‘adult.’ I find it painfully, depressingly tiresome, and it’s another pointer that the writer is running out of narrative ideas. Swearing isn’t big, or clever. I thought we all knew that? We do, it’s just that some fanboys put their ‘cool’ goggles on for certain writers, and forgive them when they really should be demanding better writing from them.

I’m going to finish off this review by neatly summing up the issue, as you’re supposed to do in a review, so who says I’m completely out of control in my writing? Okay, so I usually am, but I’ll contain myself here.

Black Science #13 is a smash and burn book. It’s the moment in a series where a writer begins to realise that he’s lost control of his project, and even though people are still reading it, the ideas are running thin and it’s starting to go a bit off the rails. The book is lazily written and focussed on family drama issues that verge on the cliché, thus removing any emotional resonance or connectivity the reader would feel to any of the characters. Added to this the fact that the characters have multiple versions of themselves, so death doesn’t even appear to matter anymore, and you’re getting a situation where you stop caring because nothing that happens seems to matter.

The book needs a re-boot, and that’s what they are going to do, but not in this issue. You’ll have to wait until issue #14 for that reboot, which means that issue #13 is just filler, not very good filler, and a book that isn’t really worthy of a purchase.



Rating: 3/10 (I’m finding it difficult to care about anything that happens right now, so a reboot of the book is absolutely vital)