Review: Faces of Evil

Posted on January 23, 2009 by Brad Guigar

Wait.

Wha–?

What happened to Faces of Evil?! For some reason, I thought this was supposed to be a monthly title that told stories from the villains’ point of view. I must have been getting this confused with DC’s other villain-centric titles, Secret Six and Terror Titans (both of which have been solid, by the way).

But this Faces of Evil event is none of that. They’ve pretty much featured the villain on the cover, superimposing the villain’s name over the title, and then they’ve gone ahead with some pretty standard storytelling.

Here’s a breakdown of what I’ve read so far:

Prometheus (One Shot): Pretty good. I found the art hit-and-miss, but the story was a page turner. It’s a very good set-up to an intriguing story.

Nightwing Ra’s Al Ghul: This is how many of the books went for me. The villain is present, but in the standard villain role. Faces promised the DCU from the villains perspective. This is a very good book, but it’s not what was promised. Ra’s appears 11 pages in, but the story itself is very much told from Nightwing’s perspective.

Green Lantern Corps Krib: Krib appears throughout, but, again, this is not the DCU from the villain’s perspective. It’s a standard GLC story — which is good — just not what I was lead to expect. A story told from Krib’s perspective would have rocked royally. What a missed opportunity.

Green Arrow and Black Canary Merlyn:Same thing. Good story told through hero’s perspective. And sod Merlyn… I wanna see more of this Poison Arrow!

Titans Jericho:Passing grade. Good story / good art. I woulda liked more of Jericho’s viewpoint, but it came closer to delivering the goods.

Booster Gold Enemy Ace:I have to be honest. I can’t bring myself to read this one. “Enemy Ace?” Really? I can’t commit past the cover. Someone convince me to invest the time.

Action Comics Lex Luthor: This was, by far, the biggest disappointment of all. Lex appears in three pages out of 24. The issue focuses on the Kandor storyline. Lex was an absolutely negligible part of the storytelling.

It’s becoming clear that this was yet another attempt to get me to pick up a bunch of titles that I don’t regularly read.

And I fell for it again.

Curses.