Cosmic Odyssey

I ordered one of those second printings of Cosmic Odyssey, because I'd heard some good things about it. It was alright, though it felt oddly paced, I think because, in what I'm assuming was meant to show all these events happening simultaneously, Starlin and Mignola keep hopping from one duo to another every few pages, and in some cases the handful of pages spent on say, Superman and Orion don't have them making much headway. It gives me this feeling that things are taking a very long time to play out, when they probably aren't. They can't be, since the Anti-Life Entities would be trying to work as fast as they could to clear the way for the Big Problem, so things would seemingly have to be happening quickly.

Starlin writes Starfire a little differently than I'm used to seeing. Mostly, he makes her less naive, where the current crop of writers tend to follow the model set by the Teen Titans cartoon (ignoring the fact that comic book Starfire's older than cartoon Starfire, has been on Earth awhile and would be less confused by Earth customs, or at least U.S. customs, since she spends the majority of her time there)*.

Also, I'm curious as to how Highfather and Darkseid came to have Etrigan in their possession**. Then again, he didn't appear to be in any condition to put up a fight, so if they could find him, it probably wasn't too hard.

I need to say something about Mignola's art, but I don't know that I can do it justice. I like that in the scene where they've gathered New genesis' requested "ambassadors", all the characters stand a little different, and Batman hangs back, so that even his mask is shadowed. There seems to be an alternation between white space between panels and black, I assume because the whole series is about various dualities, represented by the different characters. On a cursory glance though, I can't find a pattern to when the colors are used. He keeps panel layout pretty basic, no diagonal panels or anything like that, but I would say it works fine.

One thing I did not know was that this is the story where John Stewart screwed up and a planet was destroyed. I had always figured that was in a Green Lantern comic of some sort. Yet here it was, his arrogance destroying a world, though it's under questionable circumstances. He fails because the anti-life entity (or the host body its using) knows the ring is useless against yellow. How does it know that? No idea. I notice that the host (who created the bomb and painted it yellow) is dressed differently from the other natives of Xanshi. They're mostly depicted wearing robes, sort of vaguely Roman senate style, but the host is wearing pants and perhaps a polo shirt, plus glasses and rocking a lot of hair and a big beard.

I wonder, would that have described either Starlin or Mignola at the time this comic was created? Would that be a little joke, that the entity spread further than they thought, reaching the actual creative team, and taking advantage of their knowledge to guarantee success?

* Maybe I'm off base on that, though. I've never spent any time in a culture wildly different from mine, so maybe it takes many more years than Starfire's had to get comfortable with the everyday protocols of life in said culture.

** I'm always impressed with writers that can do the rhyming Etrigan and make it work, which I think Starlin does. It seems like it would be hard to write dialogue that actually makes sense, yet rhymes, especially when it's being uttered by a demon that's probably going to be describing horrible things.