Onslaught Unleashed #4

[sherkahn]

The conclusion to the Young Allies/Secret Avengers team up as somewhere in the Colombia to stop the return of Onslaught.

Where we last left off, Onslaught (stage 1) had finally come back complete to the Marvel 616, through the Negative Zone portal, no longer needing his anchor, the young hero Nomad.

Things get worse from there.



Through a long and convoluted set of misdirections and attacks, Onslaught's energy form gets dissipated, and absorbed back into the machine that brought his energies from the Negative Zone.
This buys the heros precious time to severe his anchor with the material world.

I'll let someone else post the tough decision that had to be made, but here is the aftermath of the mission.





I like the "Lost" feel to the going's on, and while the story was full of weak sauce, it does give promise to more fleshed out adventures in the future.

Comments

[shadowpsykie]

wait... what?!?!?!

[midnightvoyager]

I have absolutely zero idea of what is going on in this art.

[sherkahn]

Steve is dreaming of returning to the Island, I mean the jungle, and that the other heroes have been impaled on the facility wreckage. The atomized Nomad has come back once more, now bonded with her maker, Onslaught.

This is how the whole mini started, with Nomad getting psychic calls to her from Onslaught through dreams of the future.

[midnightvoyager]

That's... a thing, I guess.

It's just reeeeally not sequential. One panel does not follow to the next in a coherent manner at all. The first pages might as well be filled up with the words "THINGS HAPPEN".

[sherkahn]

I honestly think it helped, as the art during the day in NYC was clear and coherent, and this felt like pushing through a bad nightmare - clearly giving off the impression that something was ... *wrong* with the place.

[midnightvoyager]

That's fine, but I think it went way too far in that direction. I did not get the impression that these events were linked. For all I knew, Cap was teleported away, or everyone else was teleported away, and then corpses, and then things and etc.

The problem with a real nightmare is that it frequently makes no damn sense when you wake up. I guess it captures that element, but you lose the idea of what even happened in the nightmare at all. I had to look at it three times to get anything out of it and then ask what happened anyway.

It erred on the side of "art" instead of the side of "readability." I think it's a bit of a mistake in a sequential medium. There at least needs to be a central focal point that you can follow in sequence. The rest can go to hell, but if you can at least follow what the dreamer is doing and thinking, that is sufficient. And I couldn't. So it didn't have any sense of emotion for me, really. It sortof sunk into random images.

I mean, it's a personal taste thing, but I don't seem to be the only one who had no idea what even was going on there. Context may have helped for the ending panels in the dream, but it doesn't make it flow any better.

[salinea]

I loved the art but the story was crap. :(


Also apparently I'm the only person who loves this type of art? (wait, no, it's never just you, there's got to be someone else :D)

[midnightvoyager]

I like it alright..... AS ART.

As a storytelling device, I hate it, as I cannot tell what is going on without outside explanation.

[salinea]

I'm not sure this extract is sufficient to judge it as such. It's the end of the series so you lack context, and it's mostly about a nightmare, so it's supposed to look fractured and disjunctive. We are supposed to go "wait, what?? Oh. Ooooh... wait..."

[citygod]

agreed - and well said.

[citygod]

oops -I'm agreeing with midnightvoyager.

[auggie18]

Pretty art.

[shanejayell]

So... they killed Ricki?! WTF?

[salinea]

Indeed T_T

[sherkahn]

It gets worse. Read Fear Itself #3.

Sad, sad, sad.

[capt_satellite]

So, poor Ricki Barnes is relegated to languish in the wreckage-filled hell that all other bad Liefield ideas go to when they die. She deserved so much better.

[icon_uk]

Did we have anything from Onslaught Unleashed 1-3 posted that might give this some context?

[silverzeo]

SO this was the other time Cap died...

[mullon]

Faces, so trapeziumy.