DOC SAVAGE # 7DC ComicsDoc Savage - Ivan Brandon, Brian Azzarello & Nic KleinJustice Inc. - Jason Starr & Scott HamptonAnother month, another matter of DC's Doc Savage series. At some point, you'd suspect that DC might accidentally stumble onto a formula that works - but there's no mark of it yet.This one continues the "Stomach of the Beast" storyline and has Doc and his aides knee deep in the Middle East, still in quest of a friend of theirs that they all believed was dead. There's a lot of pointless fighting in this and various pages of decompressed storytelling where Doc and the gang talk about how amazing their friend was. It was during those pages where I hit upon a key job that I suffer with Brian Azzarello's take on the pulp characters in this First Wave universe: pacing. Azzarello is quite obviously "writing for the trade," which in comic book terms means that he stretches everything out so that it fills 6 to 7 issues, which hardly so happens to be the standard size of a funny book trade paperback. The job comes from the fact that this kind of storytelling (typified by pages of talking heads, where the characters speak "naturally" in little bursts of words, as occurs multiple times in this issue) does not fit with the pulp paradigm. Doc Savage was many things but it was never slow, boring or ponderous. It was quick, exciting reading and that's where all of Azzarello's First Wave function is falling extremely short.That and the fact that the plots don't make sense. That's a fairly big one, too. After all the issues of Low Wave and 7 of Doc Savage, I see "The War" to be a muddled mess that should either be better defined or ignored and the characters seem like pale reflections of their real selves. Really - is anybody reading this Doc Savage series and coming out with a top thought of who Doc or his aides are? I can't think how, since the storytelling leaves no way for characterization. I know - how can there be pages of talking heads but no characterization? Pretty easy. People talking and talk but they don't say anything that illuminates them as people. And away from Monk and Ham's snarky comments towards each other, most of the talks could be cut and pasted between characters and nobody would notice. The end of the main story sees the comer of the Siamese twins we were teased with before in the arc and I assume we're alleged to be aroused by their arrival but granted the fact that they, like everyone else in the book, has been given no personality, I was like "Oh, they're finally doing something with them" as opposed to "Wow! Can't expect to see what happens when Doc fights a couple of Siamese twin children."Yeah, it's pretty dumb.In the back-up, Smitty continues to cut down a murderer and rapist, intending to defeat him at some point. Now, Smitty is however never identified by name which continues to be an awesomely stupid writing mistake. If this was your first issue, you would not live who this quality was. Hell, I've been reading for seven issues and I don't live who this part is - because it sure isn't Smitty.Anyway, Smitty tracks the bad guy for years and - get this - never once disguises himself. Oh, he says he's trying to be cool about it, but he's following the man for days. Without disguising himself. So is it a blow when the bad guy says "Hey, that fella over there - I suppose he was at the Track. And the so-and-so. And the so-and-so. Isn't that weird?"A member of Justice Inc. just follows a guy for years without disguising himself. He follows him to clubs, to a racetrack, even to the freakin' bathroom. Without. Disguising. Himself.Needless to say, he gets ambushed and arrested by some cops on the take. Benson (you think him? The sensation of Justice Inc.? He's here for one page) finally arrives but doesn't bail Smitty out of jail because he's so wild that one of his crew would design a murder.Sigh. I can't express to you how often this sucks. On the positive side, the art is very pretty.This issue gets a whopping 1 out of 5 stars.
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